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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

#621

Post by crooked-v »

justin66 wrote: post #386
jforman wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Isn't CarPlay exclusive to iOS devices? If so, what you're describing might be viable with Lexus. It'd be somewhat pointless with the Toyota brand, where iOS users are a rather small minority.

There's also Android Auto, which is the near-exact equivalent for Android phones. A head unit can run both.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#622

Post by briandear »

gerbilly wrote: post #442
ken wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CarPlay is amazingly good As someone who recently rode in a car with CarPlay and saw two young technology professionals try to use it, I disagree. One of them owned the system and drove it every day it still didn't seem like either one really understood it ("Why's it doing that?" "Maybe because ..."). I agree that all the built-in systems I've seen are terrible, but CarPlay seems like merely the "least bad" impleme…

Why is carplay even a thing? Geez, can't people stop fiddling with their phones? They've become like a kind of soother, a techno nanny that people can't do without. The sooner people put those things down, the better off we'll be.

Maps. Podcasts. Apple Music: “Hey Siri, play ” Having your next appointment automatically show up in Maps ready to simply click “go.” Or “Hey Siri, where is the nearest In and Out?”

It’s amazing.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#623

Post by brettnak »

I probably own the final Mazda that has a "touch screen"... If you could ever really call Mazda's touch screen a touch screen.

A lot of the things that drive a poor experience with a touch screen are, imho, directly because they have such a poor implementation of a touch screen. Mainly, it's _slow_, _very slow_. A touch screen has to be very fast to seem like it's working, and in a car (in particular), it _must_ feel instant or it will feel like it's broken and cause distraction. I would be very interested to see some sort of apples-to-apples comparision (a good touch experience, vs a good tactile experience), but Mazda's is just not good. It's not even close to the realm of "good enough" to be used as a comparison.

I would say it's more like they never tried to do a touch screen, and then called it bad so they wouldn't have to keep trying.

And... The android auto experience is 10x better than the mazda infotainment system because of access to spotify, podcasets, and _actual_ navigation. I love the loftiness of how mazda talks about what they want to do, but they're so far off of delivering what they say they want to that I don't really know what to think. It's just bad and slow.

I really good tactile experience is probably better than a really good touch experience. But Android Auto is getting close to being a really good touch experience. The Mazda infotainment is not at all close to being a good tactile experience if you want to use say, spotify, or google maps, or use it to actually get to where you want to go.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#624

Post by Gibbon1 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #368
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. 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…

> phone phone phone phone phone phone

Either you should be driving or on your phone not both.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#625

Post by chipotle_coyote »

alistairSH wrote: post #376
ubermonkey wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I own two cars with CarPlay, one use a touchscreen (VW) and the other a rotary knob/button (BMW). I much prefer the knob - with the touchscreen, I have to focus on the screen for a longer period of time to make sure my finger hits the right spot. With the rotary knob, I still have to glance over, but only enough to ensure the correct "button" is highlighted. That feels less distracting to me. All that said, I try to…

Apple keeps Siri from accessing non-Apple apps (can't voice control into Pandora or Google Maps).

This is changing in CarPlay in iOS 13, as are a fair number of other things (generally for the better; I have a bit of hands-on experience thanks to a brave/foolhardy friend who's already installed the developer beta).

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/3/18650923/apple-carplay-ios...

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#626

Post by bumby »

Phillipharryt wrote: post #574
bumby wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Every button on that shuttle will do the same thing every time you press it. I agree with you in spirit, but would disagree with this particular point. Apollo had an erroneous "Abort" signal because a particular switch didn't do what it was supposed to, because it had some interesting failure modes in zero-gravity. I think is dangerous to assume that one design is flawless over the other; both touch-screens and mech…

Ok perhaps I could change that to "every working button on the shuttle will do the same thing every time I press it". Your mention of zero gravity has brought up another consideration for me. Assuming it's a capacitive touchscreen you need to ensure no conductive material ever floats into contact with it by mistake. Switches and buttons have covers and rails to prevent accidental pressing but how do you manage that w…

I don't think the "every working button" buys you much here because is could just as easily be stated as "every working touchscreen does the same thing every time I press it". The point from reliability engineering is that everything works until it doesn't. The difficulty with software systems is that they often have complexity that is tough to understand all the paths let alone test/mitigate them (see Boeing 737 Max as a recent example).

You bring up really good points on the zero gravity considerations. It would be interesting to see SpaceX's FMEA on this system to see what all they've considered.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#627

Post by gerbilly »

mikestew wrote: post #514
gerbilly wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're wasting your lives people! The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization. I'll give you credit for avoiding the temptation to break out the ol' "wake up, sheeple!", though.

> The fact that some just want some directions to where they're going, and to listen to some music along the way, hardly represents the downfall of civilization.

Yeah, but on the directions front, it does represent a big loss in self efficacy. I don't rely on GPS, even when travelling to foreign countries.

I know people who don't even know the cities they live in. They are living in the phone's world itself, you could say.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#628

Post by chipotle_coyote »

joking wrote: post #389
ubermonkey wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

CarPlay works with physical controls; it doesn't require a touch screen. (As another commenter noted, the same is true of Android Auto.)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#629

Post by celticmusic »

tetrep wrote: post #603
bitwalker wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is. Car conversations are a serious issue with respect to distracted driving. I personally can't handle thinking about driving safely and thinking about a conversation. Humans are famously bad at multi-tasking and I don't see how being in a car gives us magical powers. 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 dru…

If I'm speaking with someone in the car and I detect a potentially dangerous situation, I immediately stop talking to focus.

It's hard to explain, but I would say my attention is unfocused and broad. I don't know if this is ultimately safe, but I've never had an issue with it.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#630

Post by celticmusic »

magduf wrote: post #606
Johnny555 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remember driving before GPS: there was tons of time and gasoline wasted driving in circles looking for things, getting lost, pulling over and trying to make sense of a paper map that doesn't have that much resolution, asking people for directions and getting useless and wrong directions, etc. It was a total pain in the ass. I also remember life before cellphones. You couldn't communicate with people when you were e…

I don't think people are arguing that cell phones and technology is bad, just cautioning for moderation.
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