Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls • Hacker News Board

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#161

Post by whywhywhywhy » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #66

Any monitor manufacturers want to follow suit? What I'd give for hardware input source buttons. This is a ridiculous UX: 1. Touch button to open menu 2. Select "Input Source" 3. Click up/down (possibly multiple times) to find your source 4. Click OK ...when your monitor has TWO sources. Just give me 2 buttons: HDMI and DisplayPort. I don't care that this would be marginally more expensive. I'd pay it. Touch screen co…

> Touch screen controls strike me as not being about cost but being about incredibly lazy UI

It's almost always about cost. Touch screens are shocking cheap thanks to smartphones driving the prices down and physical controls can be shockingly expensive per control.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#162

Post by CivBase » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #138

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…

I work for an avionics manufacturer and I can assure you most of our upcoming comercial systems (and even a healthy portion of government ones) feature touch screen inputs.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#163

Post by kevingadd » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #123

woozyolliew wrote: post #23

Always seemed like a cargo cult: iphone good; touch good; buttons bad (steve said). Let’s hope it’s a new trend! I love that my Audi still has tactile buttons and wheels, and was a big factor in choosing it. My previous car had a touch screen and it was so dangerous having to brace my hand for accuracy and stare at my fingers while driving.

You (or maybe the market) are misinterpreting Steve Jobs. In a phone context, he is correct.

Only correct in a "whatever people buy is good, and people buy iPhones so everything they do is right" sense. Hardware keyboards on phones still are faster to type on than even the best swipe keyboard, and they work through gloves (rather relevant now in these wear-gloves, wash-your-hands days).

Of course, optimizing for WPM over other factors is not right for all customers. But a car is definitely not a phone, so.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#164

Post by kube-system » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

catalogia wrote: post #96

kube-system wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The situation is more nuanced than "touchscreens are bad"; the number of controls has grown exponentially since touchscreens have made it easier to put literally hundreds of buzzers and whistles on modern vehicles. It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated whi…

> "It's fairly common now for cars to have configuration settings like: the number of seconds that the courtesy lights stay on after locking the car. This is a feature that would never need to be operated while the vehicle is in motion, and likely wouldn't be configured more than once by any given owner." Features like that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all.…

> Features like that could be implemented as dipswitches/etc hidden in a compartment under the hood, or not at all.

How is this an improvement over having it on a touch screen?

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#165

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#166

Post by jimbob45 » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #18

samizdis wrote: post #8

Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.

Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better? Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.

Hand, not hands.

Also my steering wheel has both. I can do everything by feeling without my eyes leaving the road.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#167

Post by d_silin » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #138

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…

Too late! Boeing 777-X will have touch screen interfaces for pilots.

Personally, I think information display can and should use touch interface, but actions should be tied to physical switches or buttons.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#168

Post by slg » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #92

I will defend the screen in the Tesla 3, the simple fact is that you really never have to use on your typical drive and yes muscle memory works for simple UIs like what the Tesla employs. Compared to 40+ buttons in my previous Volt AND a screen. Many cars have that many or more buttons and this is easier? Where screen's become distracting is when the UI is shit, having more than one or two clicks to do anything, and…

What I always get from these discussions is that people fiddle with their cars settings a lot more than I do. What are people doing that requires immediate attention? The only thing I am really tempted to use the screen for while actively driving a Tesla are to adjust the temperature and turn on defrosters. Everything else is handled with physical controls or can wait until I am stopped.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#169

Post by paganel » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

Robotbeat wrote: post #18

samizdis wrote: post #8

Eminently sensible call by Honda. Knobs, dials and switches work well and do not demand that a driver takes their eyes off the road. I suppose that voice controls would be a reasonably safe tech option, but probably not cost-effective.

Is taking your hands off the steering wheel much better? Ideally, all controls would be available on the steering wheel without removing either hand. Or, as you say, voice controls.

Yes, taking one hand off the steering wheel is much better than taking your eyes off the road. Let's be honest here, we're not driving F1 cars so we don't actually physically need to be with both hands on the wheel 100% of the time, but it can take only second of us not looking at the road and we could be hitting someone/something and be dead (or we could kill that someone that we've just hit).

I really, really love to drive, I think I'm one of the few Europeans who chose to drive from Eastern Europe till the Atlantic Coast and back for his vacation just because I like driving (and wanted to see how Europe actually looks like outside of the big cities), and as such I can tell you that lack of attention (i.e. not seeing where you go and not seeing how the people around you are going) is the number one factor of accidents. I think there's nothing else that comes close to it.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#170

Post by hnarn » Tue, Mar 31, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

CivBase wrote: post #162

hnarn wrote: post #138

Look at the cockpit of any modern airliner and you will see screens, but they are never interactive. There are hardware buttons, dials and lights all over the place. A tactile interface is both more obvious, sturdy and more stable, and therefore safer. The problem that touch interfaces solve, ever since the advent of the first smart phone, is that the interface is now dynamic. You can change it without having to repl…

I work for an avionics manufacturer and I can assure you most of our upcoming comercial systems (and even a healthy portion of government ones) feature touch screen inputs.

What exact type of input is being grabbed by these screens? "Critical pilot systems"? Touchscreens already exist in airliners, for systems used by crew and passengers, but that's beside the point.