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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

#671

Post by c0vfefe »

vchak1 wrote: post #643
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. >…

From a user experience perspective, it seems strange to me that one would only consider the driver experience and not include the passenger. I 100% agree with you about the need for tactile non distracting controls for the driver. At the same time carplay controlled by the passengers phone has a lot of value in terms of value add to passengers.

This may be true, but in terms of priority, I'd estimate that a car carries multiple people only 5-10% of the time it's used.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#672

Post by lhorie »

Fins wrote: post #586
lhorie wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried inputting directions into a car GPS using rotary controls? It's reminiscent of old rotary phones and IMHO a terrible UX

Better than touchscreen, though, especially when moving (only doing it as a passenger, of course!)

Having used both, I vastly prefer the touchscreen. The rotary input takes way longer to navigate to the next letter, and it's easier to make mistakes (e.g. accidentally switching modes) and it's harder to fix them (need to cycle all the way to the end to hit backspace, sometimes having to start from scratch if your mistake was "jump out of input mode")

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#673

Post by epistasis »

xedeon wrote: post #497
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 do agree, though, that touchscreens beyond phone interfaces should be used very sparingly. The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Most of us are used to being able to adjust the AC without looking, and that's only possible because there are physical controls we can feel. This is a very common misconception. You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off…

> You CAN adjust the A/C via the steering wheel buttons, turn it off, control the fan speed etc. It's very intuitive.

I'm doing web searches for this right now and not finding anything, either for Model 3 or Model S, or just Tesla in general.

Where do they hide this information?

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#674

Post by carbine »

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. >…

I own a Mazda that has this touchscreen and I use it to set nav destinations, but otherwise I rely totally on the analog controls. Typing with analog dials can be a nightmare though so I hope they sort this out -- my mother's Audi makes you type with analog controls and it makes me want to pull my hair out. Good luck setting a destination when you're in a hurry.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#675

Post by c0vfefe »

celticmusic wrote: post #629
tetrep wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the whole problem with distracted driving is that danger is difficult to predict.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#676

Post by jwr »

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.

> Are knobs and plastic moldings that expensive though?

If you consider the entire cost, yes. Every BOM item has a huge cost associated with it, and it's price only a small fraction.

Consider that for every item you need to:

* secure supply for the next 10 years or so

* organize purchasing and put it into the supply chain

* design assembly instructions, teach workers how to assemble it

* design and implement testing procedures

* design and implement diagnostics to figure out which specific component has failed

* maintain it and keep it available for your service network for the next 10-15 years

* deal with unexpected failure rates and be ready to re-design in case of problems

* also, every knob is actually not one component, because it needs to be connected to something, which implies wires and connectors (the most problematic components in electronics) and multiples all of the above several times.

Look at it this way and suddenly you really want to minimize the number of individual components and replace them all with a single touchscreen. Especially given that you can then deliver crappy software and the market will bear it, because we have been trained to expect and accept crappy software.

But I do agree that the marketing appeal is there, too, although I think some people are waking up.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#677

Post by 8note »

sangnoir wrote: post #418
kkarpkkarp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good. There is a reason you don't see apple like designed plane cockpit. But Mazda's cockpit isn't plane cockpit either. Please go for a test drive with new Mazda 3 and you will be surpised how stupid is this decision. If you want to volume up, change a song, yes, it is easy. But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look…

> But if you want for example turn on GPS navigation, you need to use this wheel near the gearbox to: - leave a radio interface (you must look at screen and turn the wheel at the same time) Did you miss the part where they said they will be projecting an HUD onto the windshield so drivers won't have to look down? Your comment is arguing against a solution Mazda did not propose. Curiously, most of the people who are d…

I don't think that solves the issue.

whether you're looking down or forward, you're spending your attention looking at the HUD, not the road or any other sensor.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#678

Post by Johnny555 »

celticmusic wrote: post #630
magduf wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Some people are:

I'd argue that life is worse since smartphones were invented, on many axes.

and:

Now almost everyone has been turned into a phone zombie. You're wasting your lives people!

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#679

Post by IOT_Apprentice »

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.

Why? because the automaker interface is AWFUL. Also, why should I pay a car dealer upwards of $2500 to gain GPS? My phone has GPS, it also has Siri so I can talk to it.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#680

Post by natch »

Fins wrote: post #550
natch wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Tesla's all-touchscreen situation in particular seems like a terrible idea. Don't knock it until you've tried it. First off, you are completely wrong about it being an all-touchscreen situation. There are plenty of physical controls. Many people like you form conclusions based on not knowing anything about the car other than what you are told by other people. Think for yourself. Take one for a test drive.

And what if I still find that it is terrible implementation by people who should not be allowed to make anything that could be used as a deadly weapon?

Try to help make a better one I suppose, if that’s really what you think. But not from a position of ignorance.
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