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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

#351

Post by kevinconroy »

Kudos! Glad to see this swing back to tactile controls.

At the CHI conference about a decade ago I spoke with some of the lead HCI researchers at Mitsubishi (which has long contributed to human factors research). During Q/A they said the single best thing you could do to improve safety was to NOT buy a car with a touchscreen interface. Lack of tactile feedback is a major problem. We all were quick to point out that they were selling cars with touchscreens. The HCI researchers said yes the company did, but their point still stood.

You want to be able to do things like adjust heat and defrost without looking (just with hands).

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#352

Post by ehnto »

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).

The best I can come up with is transparently overlaying small information cues on the glass of the windshield, and using sound cues. I think in general the systems available to a cars HUD should be pretty limited and the controls should be on the wheel.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#353

Post by bloopernova »

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 wife recently had the chance to use 3 different car UIs.

Our own little Hyundai Elantra GT 2013. No touch screen. Connect Android phone via bluetooth. Run Android Auto app. Navigate, stream music, etc etc. We're both used to this, so it's very ingrained/easy to use the phone's touchscreen to navigate the UI.

Mercedes C300. Big screen, but not a touch screen. You had to twist a joystick then move it up/down/left/right depending on... something. That UI control mechanism did not work well with Android Auto, since there were different "sections" to each screen. You had to figure out via trial and error which joystick control method to use to switch sections. Plus sometimes moving the joystick would twist it, thus ruining whatever UI navigation you were trying to perform.

Hyundai Sonata 2019. Big touch screen. Worked perfectly with Android Auto. Not one single "mis-click" like with the Mercedes.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#354

Post by EastSmith »

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. >…

Agreed.

I've been using touch car interface for the last 5 years (Chevy). I basically do two things: - Bluetooth connect - listen to spotify _from_ my phone / listen to map directions _from_ my phone.

I rarely use the touch interface - I am switching tracks either using the buttons on the wheel (most of the time), or using the phone.

Also, I do not want another yet another "kind of familiar but different" interface like most of the car touch control systems. I want the interface on my phone, that's it.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#355

Post by kevinconroy »

zaroth wrote: post #333
vanderZwan wrote: post #316

Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design" is just as relevant now as it was back in 2011: > There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years. > Now, take out your favori…

And yet, every single phone today is nothing but a “picture under glass” and, far from a paradigm of permanent numbness, humans are intimately connected to these devices they carry with them everywhere. Rant is the right way to describe this. Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember…

Even if it's a rant, it doesn't mean it's wrong.

At CES a decade ago, I got to play with a touchscreen prototype that offered tactile feedback. Press a button and the screen would push back and/or buzz (it's been a while, hard to remember). What I do know is that it _felt_ like I was pushing on something, not just glass.

At the time, it required a big area around it. Think ATM sized. For an ATM, it'd be awesome. I'd hope Moore's law would get the tech down to phone size by now, but here we are with more apps and no tactile feedback.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#356

Post by bumby »

One thing I really dislike about everything being integrated into a single touch-screen is that you've now created a single failure point for all those integrated systems. At least with tactile controls, if my radio knob breaks I can still adjust my HVAC.

Also, when the touch-screens break they tend to be much more expensive to fix. I listened to one person say they were quoted $7k to fix one. They were of a conspiratorial mindset, so they thought it was a planned obsolescence feature to help convince someone to buy a new car instead. I don't know if that's true but the idea of a that type of reliability cost is enough to keep me from returning to the same manufacturer.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#357

Post by CedarMadness »

sizzle wrote: post #196
WalterBright wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the AC: the buttons are shaped like a human, and you press the part of your body where you want air I was driving a friend's newer car down the freeway once, and had to call him to find out how to turn on the godam defroster. There were so many knobs, switches, and dials that influence this, all labelled with icons so I had no idea what they did. Turns out that you had to push two buttons, toggle a toggle, and turn…

I want to speak to the car with my hands on the steering wheel and tell it to defrost the windows like I'm talking to an Alexa device. I can't wait for this day to come...

I think Volvo's electric car is going to be doing this with some sort of deeper Android Auto integration

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#358

Post by jforman »

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.

The one piece of feedback I gave Toyota in their post-purchase survey is: please replace the hot mess that is Entune with CarPlay.

They absolutely should give up. You can't compete with an OS and ecosystem into which billions of dollars have been sunk.

I agree, for what it's worth, that analog controls are superior to touch controls while driving. I hate that Toyota replaced an audio dial with a touch up/down control. But the value of CarPlay is just way too high.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#359

Post by Fnoord »

Fnoord wrote: post #201
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. >…

> 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). How does this relate to Apple Magic Trackpad with Force Touch?

Sorry, I badly quoted there. Was meant to quote this:

> 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.

Given that Force Touch give a form of feedback (haptic though), isn't that good enough? How many people believe that the Force Touch gives tactile feedback instead of haptic?

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#360

Post by bumby »

jodrellblank wrote: post #322
rco8786 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

people vastly prefer touch screens Do they? A car's dashboard doesn't have to be small enough to fit in your pocket; it doesn't have a screen you want to look at constantly where there's a direct trade-off between screen space and physical keyboard space; a car's dashboard doesn't have limits of where buttons can be because you have to hold it around the edges without pressing the buttons accidentally. I still hate t…

If people really do vastly prefer touch screens, I would expect to see different control mechanisms moving in this direction (steering, shifting, etc.)

The fact that they aren't going this way in the systems that __really__ matter seems to indicate that people don't really prefer touch screens.

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