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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

#341

Post by neogodless »

kkarpkkarp wrote: post #56
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.

> 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…

If you want GPS navigation, you press the "road" button:

https://images.hgmsites.net/lrg/2019-mazda-mazda3_100689497_...

You don't even need to look down to do it, because after 10 minutes of driving in your car, you've memorized the buttons.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#342

Post by sundvor »

lloeki wrote: post #217
blattimwind wrote: post #194

It's funny how the dashboard UI of lower-end cars tends to be consistently better than higher-end cars, because low end cars simply have a bunch of buttons that you can use without taking your eyes of the road. Sometimes even the location of controls is much better in low end cars; the VW up! comes to mind with all important controls located directly next to the steering wheel. Beautiful. In other cars just switching…

My current and favorite car is a '08 Euro Civic (Type-R). The whole design and layout of things there is pure genius, thoroughly designed from first principles. It takes many people aback but the hierarchy of information is very well thought out: critical up the wheel†† that you can read without taking eyes off the road (speed, turn signals, RPM limit, live cam profile (from ECU cam phasing/VTEC as an eco progress ba…

Nice! Honda have always put some great effort into their designs. I had an Accord Euro Luxury '05 some 14 years ago, and it was such a pleasure to drive around. Still regret selling it. It was the first semi affordable car on the Australian market to offer stability control and full set of airbags (as long as you got the luxury model).

I'd love to read that article you proposed. As much as I'd love a Tesla, my last #2 car (now sold) was a '14 Mazda 3 Astina and the rotary knob just worked so well - and so did the buttons, not to mention that simple heads up display, that I felt this is better than what the expensive cars are getting.

I have an eye for the new Civic Type R; it looks like the engineers had a field day designing that. For now, just riding a bike as health for this ageing office chair worker had to take priority.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#343

Post by ehnto »

_ea1k wrote: post #299
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…

> You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving. What does that have to do with anything? The touchscreen controls for most of that aren't even enabled when driving. But on the Mazda you can't even do these things with the touchscreen while NOT driving.

This entire article, arugment and comment thread is about how Mazda is removing touch screens to improve saftey while driving. I agree the Mazda solution isn't much better though.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#344

Post by zaroth »

FraaJad wrote: post #327
zaroth wrote: post #319

The real reason Mazda is purging touchscreens from their vehicles is because their screens are terrible, laggy, hard to use junk and they have no way to fix it because they lack the vertical integration and expertise to bring it in house. I would guess this is a technical failure wrapped in PR messaging.

eh.. I had a 2016 mazda that I replaced with a 2015 lexus. The mazda's rotary knob based interface is soo much better than the the "mouse" based lexus one. My mazda had the touchscreen, but I hardly ever used it.

I’m personally glad to see Mazda ceding the high ground on this. IMO they are like RIM sticking to physical keyboards in an new Apple world.

There’s absolutely no question that almost everyone fails badly at in-car touch screens. Perhaps it’s due to the myriad poor quality past implementations that many people seem to be in denial of their obvious and incredible benefits for many tasks.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#345

Post by dragonwriter »

Phillipharryt wrote: post #279
ehnto wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove the ability to control the screen while driving.

Well that's not really designing for those users then. Your original comment said there's no way to interface with a screen safely while driving, but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users. I was wondering how you could do that in a safe manner (I don't think you can personally, and agree with the no-control-while-moving idea).

> but the other user said designers need to design for those dangerous users.

The other user said you had to design for what people will do; disabling all access and removing the choice to interact is exactly doing that. Disabling hands-on interaction above a certain speed but allowing voice controls might be another option.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#347

Post by giancarlostoro »

oauea wrote: post #303
giancarlostoro wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I tried to figure out how to do this a number of times, but never saw a clear answer. I might try it next time I'm driving around.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#349

Post by throw0101a »

xvector wrote: post #219
Isinlor wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about spacecraft with touchscreens: https://www.spacex.com/crew-dragon ? Compare to the cockpit of Space Shuttle: https://i.redd.it/9mj5bcbnzsx21.jpg

Elon Musk's fascination with touchscreens is absurd and dangerous. Even in the future world where everything is autonomous, knobs and buttons will always be needed for mission-critical interactions, whether it be driving in dangerous conditions or having to perform emergency maneuvers on your "autonomous" aircraft.

> on your "autonomous" aircraft.

It seems that the FAA (and Garmin) does not agree with you:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8o0Nk8E0S4 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnuRFAAKdfg

I like Dynon's systems a bit more, as they have a few physical buttons to allow one to go to certain top-level / important parts of the menu system in a jiffy:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjADTgwCtUU

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#350

Post by nkozyra »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #96
haberman wrote: post #72

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."

For music and navigation, touchscreens are OK, as these are things you don't suddenly need to adjust if something happens. But for instance the defrost function on the AC can be something that you need to immediately control while driving 60 mph, e.g. if you enter a tunnel with moist microclimate (we have one of those nearby, it fogs up your windscreen in ~10sec at some conditions). Such things need to have physical…

> Volvo is perhaps the ultimate example in good UI for the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air:

It's nice, but it still a major issue: you need to look at it while pressing it to know state.

If, instead, it's three stacked buttons top to bottom, you don't have to do that.

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