471–480 of 974 posts
On-screen selections will involve tactile controls and I find that diable.
Why? CarPlay is a reasonably good UI unlike virtually anything pretty much any car manufacturer can create, Maps, Podcasts/music interface, etc.
Touch screens in vehicles drive me nuts! Requiring the driver to divert their attention from the road makes all tablet-style interfaces a degradation of UX. In all the cars I learned to drive in, I could adjust every thermostat control as well as every audio interface completely by touch, without taking my eyes off the road.
Not to mention the software issues! In one vehicle, you literally could not turn off the radio. Your options were to press the mute button (which would only hold until you restarted your car - at which point you'd get blaring music or static) or to just turn the volume as low as you could.
And every car is now different and unpredictable! My dashboard should be a utility, not a visually stimulating video game where I need to learn every menu and submenu just to fade the audio to the rear.
All I can say is THANK GOD, Mazda. I hope all other manufacturers follow your lead.
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>As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. Before phone integration, I might've agreed with you, or at least had no opinion on the subject. After watching many car companies, even high-end ones like BMW and Mercedes, fail utterly at producing reasonable phone integration systems or interfaces, though, I'm all-in on CarPlay. >It basically means they ha…
>CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen. >At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working…
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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…
I remember the first time I used a map on a capacitive screen (iPod Touch 1st gen) and yes, it was pretty special. But I also remember many hours around that era (and many following, adding more often) working with 3D models by touching and middle-mouse-dragging around. Then I got a 3D Connection SpaceMouse 6-axis joystick, which is hugely superior to the smoothest touchscreen. Similarly, my Xbox 360 controller and m…
You don’t want the navigation interface in your car to be immersive, or particularly precise. You want it to be super responsive, and to spend as little mental and physical energy manipulating it as possible.
1) The target area is massive — nearly the entire screen. You just need to leave space to move your finger in the direction you want the screen to go.
2) Perfectly intuitive. Versus moving a cursor on the screen where you actually press the left arrow to move the cursor left until it goes off screen so that the screen will pan right
3) Instantaneous access to any point on the screen. Tap a POI anywhere and it’s info can be displayed. Go ahead and try to select POIs in an arbitrary map location with a scroll wheel. I’ll wait. It’s “haptic”, but are you doing that without looking? Something which took milliseconds now takes a full minute of frustration.
4) Instant access to menu items. Similar to #3 - a touch interface can present multiple choices and requires only a single user input to select. One touch and you’re off. A haptic interface requires scrolling through menus to highlight an item before you can select it, which most people will glance at while they do it, and requires more mental focus than a single tap. Or worse, an array of buttons next to the screen which you’re supposed to choose from to make a selection on the screen.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>CarPlay is amazingly good, and only really works well with a touchscreen. >At this point, it would be very hard for me to buy a car that didn't have CarPlay integration with a touchscreen. I've seen implementations without touch, and they're much, much less useful. Well, maybe the solution is to make apple carplay and android auto to work well with a dpad and buttons configuration, those interfaces have been working…
> those interfaces have been working perfectly for videoconsoles and tvs Is this a joke? I find navigating my TV's menus with a remote to be the most infuriating part of using a TV.
In my experience, the latency on cable TV boxes, Smart TVs, and in-flight entertainment systems has progressively gotten worse, not better over the years.
This latency, when coupled with a car’s touch screen is even worse.
IMO this is a wrong move for mazda. Eventually if these cars become smart cars then you will not be interacting with controls as much. Touch an go.
I never tried the Mazda system, but as an experienced UX designer, I agree that touchscreen in a car is one of the worst idea ever in term of UX. It's far, it requires aim, there is no tactile feedback, some gestures (like scroll) are really hard and require constant attention.
Nothing is easier, more intuitive, or less distracting, than scrolling on a proper multi-touch screen.
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. >…