171–180 of 974 posts
I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
Do I need a book a time slot in my calendar for going to the hardware store?
Praise to Mazda for making this decision. As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch. >…
For me there is two different scenarii for controlling the car:
- while driving quick adjustments: volume up/volume down, temperature control, play/stop/skip music, start/stop navigation.
All of those should be via easy to understand, direct access physical controls.
- while parked (or by a passanger): navigation setting, app switching, playlist adjustments, peripherals setup, air control strategies, anything finicky really.
I see a case for these operations to be done by a touchscreen with no physical equivalent. Physical controls for those are juste hell most of the time.
In that sense, I feel Mazda is just throwing the towel when a more sensible and best of both world approach could be taken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision. If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy. But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look…
You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving. Also if it's physical in any way you can build accurate muscle memory and know without looking that you have gone to the right spot. This is almost never the case with touch screens interfaces. There is no safe way to interface with a screen while driving. You are taking your eyes off the road, and your focus goes with it necessarily. The safest option is no sc…
Things like that. Maybe after few years you will memorize parts of this.
I am not telling resignation from touchscreens is bad. Just Mazda didn't offer anything useful instead of it.
Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. When safety or productivity matters, you need more feedback, more options accessible and faster. That's also why you don't program on a tablet, even with a bt keyboard. Task switching is way to slow, not enough info directly accessible and multi tasking sucks.
I find it fascinating to hear tech people hate on touch screens, when this is the best-in-class feature about Tesla. Can HN be consistent? The reality is that people prefer more features than less, and buttons are not the best way. What you probably hate are old, unresponsive automotive touch screens. The future will use more microphones, be faster, use AI to predict what you want to do, etc.... But this seems like a…
I would argue its not a best in class feature, its a liability.
I don't even think you have to be defensive about it. Touchscreens can make sense for things where you need to have a flexible interface and cannot afford your physical interface to look like the cockpit of an airplane. But for everything that is even a tiny bit critical you usually want to avoid it if possible. This is why even 50k€ cinema cameras like the Arri Alexa swear on knobs and buttons. The things with butto…
The world of musical instruments went through this decades ago. Yamaha DX7, one of the best-selling synths of all time, didn't have any knobs or sliders to edit its sounds. People loved the sounds, but editing them was so hard that few musicians did - that's why you can hear many DX7 stock presets in 80's music. The 90's were the dark ages of the synth. Even the buttons went away, everything was in a menu now. The sy…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision. If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy. But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look…
Check out the control panel on a BMW X3. There are dedicated buttons for navigation, media, menu etc next to the big scrollwheel. Navigation even has two buttons. One for showing the map, one for launching a new location. The screen is touch enabled but I cannot remember the last time I actually touched it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).
I agree on the flexibility part. Interesting thought. Although that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be a touch screen. There are many non-functional buttons in my car right now, which might be wired but just don't perform an action. The car manufacturer could make it more easy to reprogram these. You can see it a bit as a Playstation controller (or whatever platform you like), it has multiple programmable buttons.…
The touchscreen is "lazy" in that it can defer thinking hard about your problem space and I can see why that alone would feel scary in a car.
On the other hand, there is only so much foresight you can have when you are innovating. Developing a Tesla might simply not be feasible without the flexibility a touchscreen gives you.