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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

#931

Post by laughinghan »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #892
zaroth wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I love the computing device because all that it presents is a solid slab of glossy glass. If it tried to present any other affordance it would be all the lesser for it. If the rant is supposed to be about the future, then IMO it spends too much time disparaging the present. I think it’s a stupid and pointless rant if the premise is “this isn’t the best it will get.” Duh? That’s like the ultimate straw-man. But o…

Besides, what else did "pictures under glass" give us? Ultimate generalizability. That's a major reason why the touch screen won. Maybe one day our devices will use nanobots to assemble any arbitrary per-app configuration of controls and gizmos and cranks and levers. But what exactly is the rant pitching in the meantime?

Nanobots sound hard to program. What if it was as easy as shaping knobs from clay and cutting paper with scissors? That's what the author works on now: https://dynamicland.org/

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#932

Post by dublin »

elihu wrote: post #827
jwr wrote: post #676

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.

That's especially true for automotive SW and interfaces, which raise dreck to a whole 'nother level. For a whole lot of reasons, I don't expect to ever buy a car much newer than about 2010 for the rest of my life. Avoiding (ob)noxious systems and interfaces is a large part of that reason.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#933

Post by dublin »

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.

No, switches (even good ones), are cheaper than touchscreens that can handle automotive heat and vibration. It hardly matters which you use anymore, since pretty much all control heads are going to be networked onto a CAN bus or the like these days. Touchscreens are a bad idea for cars though, and I applaud Mazda for being the first to try to deliberately kick the damn things back to desks, pockets, and walls, where they belong.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#934

Post by bitcuration »

It's Tesla started this design, iphonized car industry.

Screen navigation should be banned in the car no matter what type of screen it is.

When driving or piloting, what's the last time you heard the display has several levels of menu/screen to move around. Just display everything, let the eyes choose where to look.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#935

Post by dublin »

jodrellblank wrote: post #322
rco8786 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter point - we’re already seeing the role of the driver fading away from car travel. lane holding tech is readily available in your average car now. Tesla’s can drive themselves a large portion of the time. Etc. Concerns about tactile feedback and such don’t really matter if you don’t have to pay attention to the road anymore. As we’ve seen play out with phones, people vastly prefer touch screens and vastly…

people vastly prefer touch screens Do they? A car's dashboard doesn't have to be small enough to fit in your pocket; it doesn't have a screen you want to look at constantly where there's a direct trade-off between screen space and physical keyboard space; a car's dashboard doesn't have limits of where buttons can be because you have to hold it around the edges without pressing the buttons accidentally. I still hate t…

I truly wish for a current phone designed even half as well as the Palm Pre and Treo were a decade ago. (Slide-out keyboard, "Just Type", non-sucking contacts and calendar, etc.) Really, I just want an updated Pre with a state-of-the-art browser and radios...

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#936

Post by zerd »

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. >…

Same reason I hate the MacBook TouchBar. It distracts, requires looking at it, does not give good feedback and is context dependent (buttons move around).

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#939

Post by sircastor »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #92
quakenul wrote: post #88

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 The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).

If we extend this idea, why not do it for airplanes? It seems like a bad idea to be changing the layout of mission-critical systems. I'm sure it'd wreak havoc if the cockpit of a 787 was all touch screens, with UI changes pushed at the whim of developers. I drive a car with analog controls. The buttons for controlling the radio, hazard lights, the A/C, etc are all static. I wouldn't want it to change. It gets the job…

This has far more to do with customer expectations than it does with safety. It would be much harder to sell a car with a different kind of steering mechanism than a wheel. The wheel is a leftover design element. Just because it's what we have doesn't mean it's good.

Re: Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles

#940

Post by patrick5415 »

dublin wrote: post #932
elihu wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'd put it differently; I'd say we've been trained to expect anything with (user-visible) software to be crappy, and to accept it because we have no alternative.

That's especially true for automotive SW and interfaces, which raise dreck to a whole 'nother level. For a whole lot of reasons, I don't expect to ever buy a car much newer than about 2010 for the rest of my life. Avoiding (ob)noxious systems and interfaces is a large part of that reason.

I’m with you. Im not that old but new cars really have no appeal to me. Will be interesting to see how it goes hanging onto a 2010 for 50 years
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