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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

#751

Post by Fins »

zaroth wrote: post #479
kuon wrote: post #474

I never tried the Mazda system, but as an experienced UX designer, I agree that touchscreen in a car is one of the worst idea ever in term of UX. It's far, it requires aim, there is no tactile feedback, some gestures (like scroll) are really hard and require constant attention.

If scrolling is hard on your car’s touch screen, then the manufacturer failed spectacularly . Nothing is easier, more intuitive, or less distracting, than scrolling on a proper multi-touch screen.

If you are stationary and can dedicate your attention to looking at the screen, sure. In a moving car, not at all. Using touch is a spectacular failure to apply even the basic common sense.

Of course, needing multi-touch to do scrolling is a pretty major failure, too.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#752

Post by empath75 »

narimiran wrote: post #507
judge2020 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can use your preferred maps app in your car, so you can choose music using your favorite music app, so you can send and receive text messages without taking your eyes off the road. Without it, people would just be looking at their phones anyways. Guess we should go back to paper maps and listening to AM radio.

> 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?

you don't read them -- they're read to you.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#753

Post by Fins »

zaroth wrote: post #344
FraaJad wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eh.. I had a 2016 mazda that I replaced with a 2015 lexus. The mazda's rotary knob based interface is soo much better than the the "mouse" based lexus one. My mazda had the touchscreen, but I hardly ever used it.

I’m personally glad to see Mazda ceding the high ground on this. IMO they are like RIM sticking to physical keyboards in an new Apple world. There’s absolutely no question that almost everyone fails badly at in-car touch screens. Perhaps it’s due to the myriad poor quality past implementations that many people seem to be in denial of their obvious and incredible benefits for many tasks.

One thing people tend to miss is that all of those "obvious and incredible" benefits of touchscreens are applicable or should ever be applied top operating a moving vehicle.

And if there is somebody who does NOT fail at this, I'd like to meet them. They probably have a working perpetual motion engine, too.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#754

Post by zaroth »

Fins wrote: post #751
zaroth wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If scrolling is hard on your car’s touch screen, then the manufacturer failed spectacularly . Nothing is easier, more intuitive, or less distracting, than scrolling on a proper multi-touch screen.

If you are stationary and can dedicate your attention to looking at the screen, sure. In a moving car, not at all. Using touch is a spectacular failure to apply even the basic common sense. Of course, needing multi-touch to do scrolling is a pretty major failure, too.

I didn’t mean to imply scrolling should be done with two fingers :-)

But rather if you offer touch scrolling you’ll also want pinch to zoom.

“Spectacular failure to apply even the most basic common sense” is a pretty strong position. In my experience with actually using a fantastic touch interface for navigation, and having tried and hated using nav systems in expensive cars in the past, where I’ve had to resort to using my phone for nav, I am equally strongly of the position that proper multi-touch nav on a large screen (Tesla Model 3) is safer and easier than any kind of button based nav system.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#755

Post by cevn »

epistasis wrote: post #673
xedeon wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I have a model 3 and I'd like to know myself. AFAIK it's not possible..

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#756

Post by luisaguimaraes »

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. >…

Exactly! there's no place for a touchscreen in the car, although many drivers don't know it:/

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#757

Post by zaroth »

laughinghan wrote: post #699
zaroth wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, every single phone today is nothing but a “picture under glass” and, far from a paradigm of permanent numbness, humans are intimately connected to these devices they carry with them everywhere. Rant is the right way to describe this. Do you remember the first time you used a map on a smooth multi-touch screen? The joy of panning and zooming around, tapping to learn more about any particular point! I remember…

You're misunderstanding the rant. There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass. Superior to what? I think you mean superior to mouse + keyboard, and superior to a physical map. The author agrees with you, as he clarified in a followup [1] to the rant: > [Do I think the iPad is bad?] No! iPad good! For now! Do you remember the first time you used a map on a s…

> Superior to what?

Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.

It is the ultimate user interface to ever be developed? Surely I hope not.

But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#758

Post by gsnedders »

whyenot wrote: post #739
JangoSteve wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Especially now the US and Canada requires reversing cameras in all new cars, there has to be a screen in the car; the question then becomes whether it's worthwhile designing a second infotainment system that doesn't require that (somewhat costly) large colour screen for lower end trims in markets where reversing cameras aren't mandatory, and it seems to be that manufacturers think that isn't worth the cost.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#759

Post by Johnny555 »

gerbilly wrote: post #690
Johnny555 wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah that's me quoted above, and yes arguing against smartphones. I believe smartphones are a net loss to people's happiness. All of these liberating technologies are fun for the early adopters, but then become oppressive once you are expected to have them. We are quickly reaching that point. What they really are are surveillance transponders that we carry around voluntarily.

The privacy issues are real, but you're only a slave to the device if you want to be (or you let others force you to be).

Where you see oppression, I see convenience.

If I'm on vacation and forgot to turn the thermostat down before leaving, I can use an app on my phone to do so remotely.

If there's a cold spell and the furnace fails, that same app will notify me when the house gets too cold so I can find someone to go check on it.

My wife can add (or remove) items to the shopping list while I'm already at the store.

When I'm at the doctor and want to confirm what drug I'm taking, I can bring up my online account from the pharmacy.

When I'm on the bus home and watch to finish reading the book I was reading at home on my eReader, I can bring up that book on the app on my phone -- and it will start up on the page where I stopped reading last night.

I do have my work email delivered to my phone, but I turned notifications off -- I only see a work email if I intentionally look for it.

I do have a notification app from work installed on my phone that can notify me 24 hours a day when I'm on call, but even that is more convenient from when I carried a pager and only got a numeric page so I couldn't tell whether or not it was something that had to be dealt with immediately or could wait until I got home later -- I'd have to dial-in to find out (and I had to literally dial-in on a physical phone line since in those days my phone wasn't a hotspot that can give me internet access anywhere, or I can just check on the service with my smartphone instead of having to get out my laptop)

There are lots of ways the phone makes my life more convenient.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#760

Post by laughinghan »

zaroth wrote: post #757
laughinghan wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding the rant. There are some interfaces which are absolutely superior when provided as picture under multi-touch glass. Superior to what? I think you mean superior to mouse + keyboard, and superior to a physical map. The author agrees with you, as he clarified in a followup [1] to the rant: > [Do I think the iPad is bad?] No! iPad good! For now! Do you remember the first time you used a map on a s…

> Superior to what? Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists. It is the ultimate user interface to ever be developed? Surely I hope not. But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.

But I love the iPad because it’s flat and glassy, not despite it.

Really? Your kitchen counter and car windshield are also both flat and glassy. Are you sure you don't love the iPad because it's a huge touchscreen controlled by software with virtually limitless capabilities, rather than because it's flat and glassy?

Superior to everything else that ever came before and that currently exists.

That's my point about you misunderstanding—the rant is explicitly about the future, as mentioned in the title and throughout the introduction.

Black-and-white film photography was superior to everything else that ever came before and that existed at the time. But it wasn't the grayscale that made it revolutionary. It's not the lack of tactile feedback that made the touchscreen revolutionary.

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