601–610 of 974 posts
Oh wait... they actually didn't!
Mazda's decision is very good: Any UI where you need to detour your attention from driving to changing car status is missing the point of its existence.
Based on my experience, Mazda needs a larger display located closer to the driver if they want to make use of touch controls without the side effects they mention. The wheel method is horribly clunky and takes more thinking to get to the control you want to adjust. It's much faster and safer I believe being able to access the control quickly and in a position that doesn't require you to take your eyes far away from the road. You still have to look at the display and process your control movements when using the dial control on the Mazda and it takes longer. Tesla has a better UI by far. If you haven't driven a Model 3 yet, I recommend doing so before commenting against touch screen UX.
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> so you can send and receive text messages How about not reading messages while you're driving? And why do you have to write messages while in traffic? Can't this wait?
The whole point is that you are neither reading or writing them, they are read _to_ you, and you dictate messages if you feel the need to reply while driving, but both can be done with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. I suppose it is up for debate whether just the act of listening or speaking is distracting enough to be considered a bad thing.
I thought I had read a study about talking to people in your car versus drinking, but here's a similar one with talking on a phone versus being drunk: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16884056/
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's 100% fad driven. Expect block chain in a car at some point because the future.
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. >…
Initially this was done to save cost, but lately it's removed a severe and justified roadblock to the addition of useless features, IMO.
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Thanks, you're just making my point for me. I mean you said app twice in it. Ten years ago, nothing was mediated via an app, somehow we managed to survive. Now almost everyone has been turned into a phone zombie. You're wasting your lives people! FOMO is entirely backwards, you shouldn't be afraid of missing out on something in your phone, you should be afraid of missing out on your entire life.
10 years ago we still had in-car GPS's, but instead of being an app it was a standalone device, I don't see how that makes anything better. Having my car read a SMS from my wife reminding me to pick up eggs from the store on the way home hardly seems like being a zombie. We survived without a lot of things we have now that we didn't have 10, or even 100 years ago, but that doesn't mean we were better off without them…
I also remember life before cellphones. You couldn't communicate with people when you were en-route, so you didn't find out until you got there that something was canceled, or you needed to get something on the way, or were meeting somewhere else, etc. So again, lots of wasted time and gas.
I'm surprised people with this luddite mentality don't tell us that we should all just go back to writing letters, because things were so great back before we could have real-time conversations over a long distance...
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…
Lower end cars are often more reliable too owing in part to simpler designs. Some of the highest end luxury and status symbol cars have frequent issues and high repair costs.
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I'm a huge fan of Carplay. Instead of having to listen to FM radio or fiddle with a phone screen on a silly dashboard sticker things, I get a massive screen with my phone on it. I can listen to podcasts and Spotify, follow Waze, dictate messages, all without fiddling
Maybe I don't switch back and forth between stuff while I'm driving as much as you do? I set everything up before I need to focus on the road, and then I just drive. If I need to change to a different playlist, or switch from music to the news, I pull over , make the switch, then start driving again. If CarPlay makes it more tempting or productive for me to do non-driving things while I am driving , then it is not a…
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While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer, causing moderate damage to the front right bumper of his 2017 Suburban. It cost $5000 to repair due to all the sensors and technology. It would have been $1000 or less in a 1997 Suburban.
But when one of those sensors saves him from having a crash, or even saves his life, that $4k difference isn't worth even thinking about. Even a minor crash involving another car can cost well over $4k, after you consider how much your insurance rates are going to increase.
But I agree, with driving being so hazardous to health I would certainly be willing to pay more for a vehicle that has a significantly improved accident survivability.
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. You are viewing the 'need' from the end user perspective. That is likely not the driving force that is causing touch screen proliferation. The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs. A single, rectangular, touch screen, that can swallow up a bunch of different knobs and button…