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Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

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Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#771

Post by boomskats »

zaroth wrote: post #333
vanderZwan wrote: post #316

Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design" is just as relevant now as it was back in 2011: > There's a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called "work" for millions of years. > Now, take out your favori…

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…

Normally a BlackBerry fanboy chimes in at this point, so I'm happy to be that guy.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#772

Post by Fins »

zaroth wrote: post #754
Fins wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I think it would be a reasonable argument that if you need to fiddle with navigation while driving, your nav system failed. And honestly, whether I am using Waze on the phone, or built-in nav, short of "crap, I've put a wrong destination in" I've never had any particular need to do anything to the nav system once I start going.

Now, sure, I can see how a large touch screen might make a better interface for navigation only, as long as you are stopped and can use it without having to look at the road. But I know of an even better interface -- give me keyboard and mouse, and even with desktop Google Maps I'll get routes faster than with any touchscreen system out there.

But of course 1) mouse/keyboard in a car isn't very feasible, and 2) that touch screen, since it's already there, is being used for controlling other systems in the car, too. And that is a problem. Anything that may need a quick adjustment while you're driving (and in real world, of course, that includes things you shouldn't really be doing while driving...) should be doable with muscle memory and at most a quick glance. Touchscreen doesn't do that, so I think it clearly does fail the common sense test.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#773

Post by frei »

Shivetya wrote: post #329
pessimizer wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First off with regards to the touch screen in the Tesla. In the vast majority of drives I never ever touch it. Not once. Why not? Well I have my temperature preference set, I usually play the music that is coming off my phone, and well, what else do I need to adjust in my car? I can do music volume, do next or previous song, and pause music, from the left steering wheel button. Wipers and headlamps are automatic. N…

I promise you both work just fine it designed properly and placed properly. Example, 2017 Chevrolet Volt. Center stack UI was nice to look at it but many options required multi level drill downs to change. HVAC controls were at the bottom of the center stack. Forty plus buttons between steering wheel and center console and this does not count all functions on stalks. Z4 I had had three stalks and forty plus buttons w…

Well since you bring up heated seats, the TM3 does not turn on the heated seats automatically based on temperature / butt-in-seat and changing it requires 3 touchscreen taps, two of them high-precision taps, where as the Volt has simple tactile controls. Though I will say the Volt has some of the worst climate control UI I've ever seen.

Similarly the defrost is not automatic and the button requires a precision tap.

There are a couple of reasons you might need to actually use the controls in a car with some regularity.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#774

Post by schreiaj »

owl57 wrote: post #735
leonroy wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

"Oh, I'm sure touchscreens have gotten better"

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#776

Post by frosted-flakes »

gonehome wrote: post #714
frosted-flakes wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inter…

I'm not the person you responded to, but are people buying them? I'd actually be curious how many people are buying them - it wasn't enough to save RIM. I think not as popular as the iPhone is a pretty big understatement and thinking that's mostly about Apple's marketing comes across as pretty clueless to me. Some people still prefer horses to cars, but it'd be a generally bad idea for someone getting into the transp…

FYI, BlackBerry hasn't been called RIM since 2012, and BlackBerry doesn't make the hardware. They just licence the brand to other manufacturers like TCL, which makes most of the current devices.

That's a false analogy. A horse-drawn carriage is a fundamentally different mode of transportation than a car, but a BlackBerry is identical to any other smartphone except for the small keyboard on the front.

The reason BlackBerries are not popular is because early touch screen smartphones were simply so much better than the BlackBerries of the day, and that set the precedent in consumers' minds that smartphones are slabs and smartphones with keyboards are bad (as evidenced by the people in this thread). But modern BlackBerries are just slabs with keyboards. If BlackBerry didn't aim their company at the ground at full throttle, the present phone landscape might look a lot different.

Also, most people simply don't need a smartphone with a keyboard, because all they use it for is SnapChat and FaceBook. It's like saying mechanical keyboards are inferior to rubber membrane keyboards because only a relatively tiny portion of the population uses them.

And yes, people are buying them. Not many, but it's apparently enough to be profitable, because TCL keeps releasing new models. Not on the levels of Samsung's S or Apple's iPhone devices obviously, but that's not what matters. (Close to a million KeyOne models were sold in 2017, but I don't know what the current numbers are like.)

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#777

Post by pugworthy »

ceejayoz wrote: post #700
leonroy wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> A heavily vibrating vehicle which needs to be operated quickly and with 100% reliability by a human operator really should not be operated via a proliferation of touch screens and touch buttons as the images above show. In fairness to SpaceX, Dragon largely isn't designed to be operated by a human. There's a reason that page calls out stuff like "how warm should the cabin be" as the sort of decisions being made wit…

To quote the page linked earlier...

> Crew Dragon will be a fully autonomous spacecraft that can also be monitored & controlled by on board astronauts and SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, CA.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#778

Post by pugworthy »

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.

They may be cheap to create, but the cost of upgrading is incredibly expensive.

It's impossible (without great expense) to add a new physical button to a car as an upgrade. Very easy to push a software update that updates a touch display.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#779

Post by bradlys »

magduf wrote: post #598
rjohnk wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer, causing moderate damage to the front right bumper of his 2017 Suburban. It cost $5000 to repair due to all the sensors and technology. It would have been $1000 or less in a 1997 Suburban.

But when one of those sensors saves him from having a crash, or even saves his life, that $4k difference isn't worth even thinking about. Even a minor crash involving another car can cost well over $4k, after you consider how much your insurance rates are going to increase.

> While not directly related to buttons, recently my father ran into a deer

So, uh, he ran into a deer even with the sensors.

We could give the benefit of the doubt and say maybe the sensors slammed the brakes when the deer was on the road and did so before he could ever react but I doubt it.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#780

Post by LifeLiverTransp »

LifeLiverTransp wrote: post #775

What i nerver got- is why you cant make a non plane touchscreen? Why not just add Knobs, Dials and Buttons - with touchscreen on them? Give the surface the option to be tactile and fall back to a default UI, that can be used blindly?

Or at least to allow magnetic sliding glasnobs and buttons to be attached to the screen and used.
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