Those dials in BMWs are from the fucking devil
Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
301–310 of 974 posts
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#302I'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."
That's the optimum best-case.
On the contrary I recently plugged my phone into the USB port of a hired Peugeot 207. All I wanted to do was charge it. But every few seconds the phone and in-car functions were interrupted by native pop-ups stating "No Android Auto compatible apps found". Constantly for the whole journey when I was trying to use my phone for navigation.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#303Praise 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. >…
When my iPod Classic died it really stung especially since they discontinued them. I hate playing music on my phone. I cant skip songs or pause without looking properly if I am on an aux cable. Sure Bluetooth is a thing but you dont always drive your own car and every car has their own convoluted way to do Bluetooth. I wish Android or iPhones had multimedia related buttons somewhere on them (dont miss that lock butto…
You can skip tracks by long pressing the volume keys if you configure it: https://www.xda-developers.com/skip-music-tracks-android-vol...
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#304I am reminded of a quote I read lately referring to now Ford CEO’s Jim Hackett’s research in understanding the automotive industry (he came from outside the industry). Specifically: when it comes to cars, people LOVE their cars. Someone’s relationship with their car is very intimate and personal, in many ways more so then a house. Much of the discussion I am seeing in this thread is very passionate, which confirms th…
Just to offer a counter anecdote, I am passionate about this topic because it involves life and death. I care about my car in so far as it gets me places. If I didn't need it in my car centric city I wouldn't have one. But, as other people drive, and I walk or cycle, I want those people to have car GUIs that do not distract them.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#305Praise 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. >…
As a counter point - we’re already seeing the role of the driver fading away from car travel. lane holding tech is readily available in your average car now. Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. As we’ve seen play out with phones, people vastly prefer touch screens and vastly prefer familiarity. Standardizing cars across a couple of different interfaces vs each car having a brand new layout of analog switches, knobs, and doo-hickeys is a much better rider experience.
Much like how a “phone” went from “a device to call someone on” to what an iPhone does today, a “car” is going from “something you drive” to just another device you interact with in various ways and it also happens to be able to get you from point A to point B.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#306Earlier 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…
I understand the thought, but in the real world this is counterproductive and dangerous.
Some interfaces it’s pretty clear that they are best served by physical buttons, toggles, switched, etc. Blinkers, gear selector, volume, windows, for example.
Some interfaces it’s equally clear that they are best served by touch. Text input through an on screen keyboard obviously beats a scroll wheel to select individual letters. Likewise panning and zooming a map.
Now, whether some of these interfaces are being operated while parked or driving is actually a completely separate matter. As you note, any touch feature can be dynamically locked out from operating while in drive. But to answer that question you can’t take the position of a nanny chastising a child. You have to take a holistic view of what actual users in the real world will do based on your decisions.
So, navigation is a great example. People need to navigate while driving. Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out. As much as you might like to, car designers don’t get to choose whether drivers are going to do this activity while driving. They can provide an interface that is as safe and convenient as possible, or drivers will just use their phones instead.
Every car nav system I ever used, including fairly recent Audi and Mercedes ones, that depended on physical buttons for input was universally terrible. So bad that it wasn’t worth using and so the phone was used instead.
Compared to the Tesla Model 3 nav system which is fully touch, highly responsive, and beautifully rendered. It is a total joy to use and increases overall safety through large touch affordances which make sense for the driving environment. And it’s so easy to activate I almost always have my destination plugged in, which means the car is showing me upcoming traffic and helping me avoid accidents through alternate routes, which is also increasing safety and decreasing overall traffic congestion.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#307I 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…
I couldn't agree more!
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#308Good! They may make the interior look cleaner and save the manufacturer having to stock various small parts and not having to install buttons and dials depending on the trim level, but from a safety perspective tactile feedback is key to minimizing distractions while driving, and touchscreens just don't have that.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#309Good. 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 mean, Tesla's marketing department claims that the big touchscreen thing is a best in class feature. In reality, that's at best subjective.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#310Praise 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. >…
When my iPod Classic died it really stung especially since they discontinued them. I hate playing music on my phone. I cant skip songs or pause without looking properly if I am on an aux cable. Sure Bluetooth is a thing but you dont always drive your own car and every car has their own convoluted way to do Bluetooth. I wish Android or iPhones had multimedia related buttons somewhere on them (dont miss that lock butto…
Not to mention that the on-the-go playlist feature worked great on iPods (just hold the button down) but Apple still hasn't figured that out on iPhones.
Agree that Bluetooth is a nightmare. Every Bluetooth radio wants to dig into my phone and download my contacts (and who knows what else) but all I want to do is play music. If I do this in a rental car I have to remember to figure out how to wipe the radio when I'm returning the car and already rushing to catch a plane, so I don't even bother with Bluetooth any more. It's maddening.