Mercedes solves this with non-touch screens with physical controls within natural reach
Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
731–740 of 974 posts
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#732Praise 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. >…
Mazda (at least my Mazda6 from a few years ago) can do this because they have a great interface to the entertainment/info system. They have a joystick with a few mouse-like buttons on the center console just behind the gear shift. It's very easy to do common tasks like change volume, change station, skip to next in playlist without taking eyes off the road. My wife actually didn't realize for more than a year that th…
Yup, agree 100%. We bought a 2014 Mazda 6, and while it has a touch screen, I find myself only using the control knob 99% of the time. It's vastly superior to any touchscreen interface I've ever used, and also far better than some of the mouse-like joysticks in some cars (think later 201X Lexus vehicles and such).
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#733Praise 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. >…
Have you ever used iDrive? I've been using it in cars occasionally for at least 10 years and it still confuses me. I just bought my first vehicle with it yesterday, so maybe I'll get better at it. Touchscreens are not great in cars but if you can perform the action quickly, it beats fiddling with a knob for 15 seconds.
Does it? I can locate and adjust a knob without ever taking my eyes off the road. The same can't be said for a touchscreen.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#734Praise 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 makes prefect sense: the whole automotive industry has a terrible track record for ui/ux in the non-driving parts of the cars because they don't care about it enough to put the effort in.
So they outsource to Apple and Google that made a, frankly, even with touchscreens, better system then what car manifacturers would have ever produced.
Now the problem is that Apple and Google had a hammer and treated the problem like it was a nail when it was not...
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#735Earlier 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…
> The likely driving force that is causing it is the manufacturers BOM costs. Whilst I think this is part of it's about more than just reducing the BOM. There's a trend to move all interfaces from knobs and switches to touch screens even when money isn't the problem. For example the SpaceX Dragon capsule also takes this approach which you can see from the images below: https://www.spacex.com/crew-dragon A heavily vib…
Buyer's only get a chance to regret it after they've spent a lot of time with the vehicle.
Several years ago, probably. Now, when their previous car already has a similar touchscreen?
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#736Earlier 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've owned a Tesla for nearly 3 years, and I have no idea how to do that via the steering wheel controls. I'll dork around with the interface when I get back in my car after work today to try to figure that out. But evidently at least for me, feature discovery is half the challenge, no matter how easy it is once you've discovered it.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#737Not ready to give Mazda any praise for their infotainment systems. I leased a 2019 CX-5 Grand Touring Reserve a couple months ago. Had I known how bad Mazda’s UX was I would have leased something else. First off their system takes an eternity to cold boot. If I’m making a quick run to the store or dropping the kids off at a friends house the system isn’t available for most of the ride. While it’s booting, the radio r…
Yeah I bought a CX-5 recently and could write a case study on how to infuriate your users in every way possible. I like the car in general, but their infotainment would have been a dealbreaker if they didn't have Android Auto support. Even then it's pretty bad. Can't even get to your phone's voice assistant via their system, even though my $18 bluetooth handsfree in my old car could.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the big one for me would be radio and temp. I assume no one in their right mind would put lights or cruise control behind a touch screen, but I could be wrong there. And maybe part of it is me being set in my old man ways, but I don't want a touch screen for any of that. Probably the only 2 things I can see being useful on that screen are the reverse camera and GPS that talks to you and you can glance at it o…
I think Teslas make you use the touchscreen for adjusting the cruise control speed
Not on the Model 3, it's a physical knob on the steering wheel.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#739Earlier 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…
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…
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.
Every modern car is going to have an infotainment system with a screen. A better question would be whether it is cheaper to have a touch version of that screen or to have buttons for the interface. I suspect that touch would be cheaper than buttons.
Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles
#740I like a keyboard better than a touchscreen for writing text, and I like a keyboard with mechanical switches better than one with membrane switches. More expensive, yes, but the user experience is very much better.
One of the primary advantages is that I can usually find the key I want without looking down at the labels.
In a car, I want tactile clickiness in mechanical or electromechanical controls. I even want rocker or throw switches, instead of buttons that light up an LED to indicate their state. And that means if the state changes in software, a solenoid or motor is going to have to flip the physical state too.
Touchscreens, despite having "touch" in the name, are strictly inferior for finger-based inputs. They're more "screen" than "touch".