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Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

motorauthority.com

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Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#251

Post by nova22033 »

marapuru wrote: post #47

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. >…

>It basically means they have given up on developing a good branded interface between the driver and the car.

Or, people actually like CarPlay and Android Auto and audi would have to spend a lot of money to keep up. Newer audis already support CarPlay. They're only switching from a rotary controller to a touch screen.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#252

Post by kalleboo »

moviuro wrote: post #89

See this 2014 article about a good car UI with touchscreens [0]; though it may take some getting used to. Switching back to analog controls and buttons is a sane move in that respect. [0] https://matthaeuskrenn.com/new-car-ui ; and HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7261003

I that guy suggesting multitouch on a car touchscreen? That seems terrible. I find just swipe scrolling extremely awkward at arm's length (and this is with CarPlay so it's not just due to weird car UI acceleration curves)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#253

Post by Phillipharryt »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #250
ehnto wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn’t matter what you “shouldn’t” do when it comes to mass-market consumer devices. It only matters what people will do, especially when you share a road with them. And when it comes to vehicle interfaces, you should assume 80% of drivers will adjust them during a drive, no matter how inconvenient and dangerous is. Any system that doesn’t recognize this reality — and try to minimize the harm if it — is just goin…

How you do design for this consumer who is controlling while driving without encouraging the activity by making it easier?

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#254

Post by gambiting »

majewsky wrote: post #224
gambiting wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then MB/BMW approach of having a touchpad near your wrist is perfect - you can draw letters with your finger without having to worry about hitting miniscule letters on the screen.

Do they have a second touchpad for us lefties?

Well, I'm in the UK so I have to use it with my left hand even though I am right handed - it works fine. Because the letter recognition is based on a single letter at a time it works fine even if I make an absolute mess of it with my left hand.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#255

Post by javajosh »

rswail wrote: post #112

Years ago I had a friend that was an embedded HW/SW guy working for our local Ford manufacturing (AU). He was very proud of an antenna switch that had options for "fully up/halfway/fully down" and explained all the complexities of counting revs on the motor that was doing the moves and remembering the count and working out whether it had reached the top etc. When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 pos…

>When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank.

In fairness, there's a lot to be said about limited options. The benefit of the 3 position switch is simply that the user doesn't have to think about what the "optimal" position is. Moving the antenna up and down goes from selecting one of 3 numbers, to hitting a button to make a floating point number increase, and then hit another button to stop it on the right position. I personally don't think that's a good UX for the majority of people. (Heck, I'm not even sure what the point of a 3 position antenna is!)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#256

Post by 6thaccount2 »

marapuru wrote: post #47

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. >…

Makes me tempted to buy a Mazda. I like the AWD and reliability of a Suburu, but their touch screens are absolute garbage and going from my analog 6-disc changing Honda Accord to driving the much newer Subaru is painful.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#257

Post by skywhopper »

Shivetya wrote: post #205
Phillipharryt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you often get into new and different cars and drive them? Your last paragraph is an odd argument. The buttons in my car stay in the same place and don't change with context. If I want to turn the radio down I reach over and rotate the knob to the left, muscle memory and tactile response. That knob will never do anything except the radio volume. Far safer because I don't even need to glance at it. Edit. Your top pa…

Okay, so how does any of this conflict with what I stated. Most vehicles with screens, touch or not, usually have audio controls copied to the steering wheel. How many buttons it takes is dependent on brand and even model. Plus you will take your focus off driving while reaching, muscle memory or not. Let alone a good driver is always looking around which includes glances left and right so as long as the task you are…

How many cars have you driven? The whole point here is to design the UI thoughtfully. Yes, there are cars with confusing buttons and knobs, but a touch screen is worse, not better. There is no way to develop muscle memory for pushing spots on a touch screen especially when there might be a modal dialog or if a software update has “improved” the layout of functions.

Physical buttons and knobs and switches that don’t move can be learned by muscle memory alone, and even the ones you need to look down for, that takes an order of magnitude less time and concentration to deal with a physical switch over a digital icon.

There are plenty of features that are fine to be behind a touchscreen, but there are some that just need to be physical buttons. If they are on the steering wheel that counts! But I have never seen HVAC or defrost controls on the steering wheel. And most of what I see these days are soft switches and buttons that require looking at a screen to interpret, which is again, worse.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#258

Post by Firadeoclus »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #170
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we extend this idea, why not do it for airplanes? It seems like a bad idea to be changing the layout of mission-critical systems. I'm sure it'd wreak havoc if the cockpit of a 787 was all touch screens, with UI changes pushed at the whim of developers. I drive a car with analog controls. The buttons for controlling the radio, hazard lights, the A/C, etc are all static. I wouldn't want it to change. It gets the job…

You drive car with pedals and steering wheel. Everything else that is ternary (music, climate, nav) is on touch screen. So yes, you can have cabin light and temperature controls on touchscreen on an airplane.

> So yes, you can have cabin light and temperature controls on touchscreen on an airplane.

Which means, annoyingly, that you can be locked out of those controls during crew announcements.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#259

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

throwayEngineer wrote: post #164
sametmax wrote: post #10

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'm a tech guy, and a car guy. I love cars. Keep the "features" the hell away from my cars. I don't want to sit about in a mobile cinema. I want a car I can drive.

The big touch-screen is a reason why I would not buy a Tesla. The reasons to buy one are economy and performance. Hell, the Prius might have actually been a decent car if it didn't look like a shoe, sound like an overburdened vacuum cleaner, and handle like a beluga whale.

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