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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

#631

Post by smackay »

TheGRS wrote: post #610
pwg wrote: post #578

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. 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…

Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the seller's perspective), I have to think having a shiny touch screen on your new Mazda is simply just trying to get more people to purchase a new car and nothing more.

There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#632

Post by JangoSteve »

pwg wrote: post #578
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. 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…

This argument doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It seems like an inconsistent comparison to compare a single touchscreen to many customized knobs/buttons/etc., when you could also compare a single set of knobs/buttons/etc. to different screen sizes across models.

Car companies don't tend to custom-design knobs/buttons/etc. for each model. They tend to reuse the same ones across many models to save on development and manufacturing costs. They also already modularize these knobs and buttons across different "accessory classes". You can probably see this in your own car even, if you see anywhere on your car's center console or dashboard which has plastic caps where it seems like more buttons or knobs belong. Those are likely buttons/knobs for additional functions in optional feature packages.

Also, even for the same screen size across models, you'd still likely need custom bezels since most models are differently sized and thus have different dashboard shapes/sizes within which the screen is mounted.

Especially with how high-resolution touchscreens in cars are becoming in new models, I doubt they're cheaper than a handful of plastic knobs and buttons.

My guess is that it's exactly what they said. It's probably harder from a software perspective to adapt touch-screen-based interfaces like Android Auto and Apple Car Play to physical controls, and those difficulties probably come up over and over as the versions of these interfaces on the phones are constantly being updated, and the car must continue supporting more and more versions at one time.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#633

Post by JangoSteve »

smackay wrote: post #631
TheGRS wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though? I'm not sure this is really a driving factor. Touch screens have marketing appeal (at least from the seller's perspective), I have to think having a shiny touch screen on your new Mazda is simply just trying to get more people to purchase a new car and nothing more.

There are lots of wires and connectors that come with mechanical controls. Everything need to be certified to make sure you don't have a recall of a million or two vehicles because the air-conditioning dials break after 6 months. All that must be crazy expensive compared to solid state electronics.

None of this is untrue with touchscreens. They also have wires and connectors and must be certified.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#634

Post by justinpombrio »

bitwalker wrote: post #563
narimiran wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not up for debate; we have evidence that it's dangerous. The NHTSA says:

"The available research indicates that cell phone use while driving, whether it is a hands-free or hand-held device, degrades a driver’s performance. The driver is more likely to miss key visual and audio cues needed to avoid a crash. Hand-held devices may be slightly worse, but hands-free devices are not risk-free."

Though it doesn't link to any studies and I'm too lazy to go searching, so if you want a primary source you'll have to find it yourself...

https://one.nhtsa.gov/Driving-Safety/Distracted/Policy-State...

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#636

Post by CWuestefeld »

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. >…

The stakes are much lower, but the same complaints apply to media center remote controls.

Recently my Logitech Harmony ONE died, and I replaced it with their current high-end device. I HATE it. I want to be looking at the TV when using it, not shifting attention to the remote's touch screen. Worse, the remote wants to support lots of controls, which it implements by allowing a swipe between pages. But it's way too easy to accidentally change pages, and the pages are all different kinds of things, so it's not clear how to swipe back to the one you want.

So I took the $100+ device and threw it in the closet. I bought their 665 model, which is a big "peanut" form factor. It has all physical buttons, except four are located on the edge of an LCD screen. But that's not a touch screen, it's just for labeling purposes. All the buttons on the device are physical. This $50 device is so much easier to use than it's big brother.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#637

Post by doctorRetro »

A big reason I still love my 12 year old car (a Mazda, by chance) is that it doesn't have a touch screen. I've borrowed a number of cars over the years that have touch screens and I hate them; they're distracting, they're not intuitive, and you can't use them without taking your eyes off the road. I'll say this for Mazda; they're practical.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#638

Post by frosted-flakes »

xedeon wrote: post #513
frosted-flakes wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s like people arguing for the return of the blackberry form factor in smartphones. Is there something wrong with that? The BlackBerry form factor is the best one, in my opinion. This reply was written from one.

What you're alluding to here is personal preference. If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today. One of Steve Jobs's famous argument on this is that you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.

> What you're alluding to here is personal preference.

I wasn't alluding to anything. I said so explicitly that it was my personal opinion.

> If the Blackberry form factor is truly the best, people would still be buying them today.

People are buying them. They're not as popular as Apple's iPhone, but that says more about Apple's marketing than anything else.

> you can make the UI better over time on touchscreen interfaces compared to QWERTY based ones.

My phone has a touch screen (a large one), and if I really want to, I can bring up a virtual keyboard, so your point doesn't make sense.

And a hardware keyboard doesn't mean you can't make the user interface better. Android doesn't make very good use of the physical keys, but my old BB10 OS BlackBerry did, because it was designed with it in mind, and it was continually being improved.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#639

Post by iotku »

Android auto in a rental car got me through quite a bit with Google maps without needing a car mount for my phone, but again I still never really touched the screen much outside of initial setup while parked (getting location punched into the map and maybe starting some music).

It's handy while parked, but I don't think I want to be fiddling much with a touch screen while driving.

On the other hand, I don't see why my passenger can't be operating it while I'm driving.

Still against volume and climate controls not being physical buttons or knobs because having to look at a screen while driving for more than half a second is bad news.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#640

Post by bdamm »

raydev wrote: post #490
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…

Ignoring the radio and focusing only on airflow controls: I dearly miss the console in my base model 2006 Yaris. It had 3 Fisher Price-sized knobs that I never had to look at when switching from feet/defog/face, changing temperature, and fan speed. It never stressed me, and each position on the knob had a satisfying clunk. I "upgraded" to a 2017 Subaru and the air controls are laid out with completely flat, indistinc…

Thanks, now I can appreciate my 2013 VW Jetta TDI with its three fisher-price knobs for air control, which work just as you describe.
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