Yay Honda!
I've never been in a car that had a better designed interface than my '91 Accord. I'm sure they're out there but if a budget car can have such a pleasant interface there's no reason they all can't.
Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#172The physical dial and nobs and the tactile feedback when human drivers get from operating them is much better than touch screen controls. I applaud Honda's the design, as well as some German automakers' design in the same vein.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#173Always 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.
Was he not coming primarily from a design perspective?
Design =/= usability?
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#174Look 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.
The problem is not "having touch interfaces", the problem is "having touch interfaces for critical systems".
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#175What if--and stay with me for a moment--what if it's good for different manufacturers to have different approaches to the problem, giving people the option to choose Honda for buttons or Tesla for touchscreens? What if there are legitimate arguments for both and it's good that there's both options available?
If your metric is safety, control, and effectiveness, there is not an argument. Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature.
> "Touchscreens are a cost saving measure, not a feature."
That's why there are so many high-end phones with lots of buttons.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Touch screens are cheap and very easy to develop for. They also de-couple the software development from the device development. It also allows updates and changes after the car is in production.
And customers apparently like them, when deciding what to buy.
Customers often don't have much choice. Most people don't make car buying decisions based on the head unit.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#177https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... A more in-depth article last year on why Mazda is doing this.
Yep, Mazda were the most vocal about rejecting the touch screen trend, and Honda and Toyota are losing a lot of customers to Mazda who have been producing the best cars in their class in the last several years so it makes sense that they are jumping on the bandwagon.
Since peaking in 2015 Mazda is not growing. They are steadily losing market share over the last 10 years. They make attractive cars, but they bet on pretending that they are a "premium" brand and priced themselves out.
https://carsalesbase.com/us-mazda/
https://www.autonews.com/sales/mazdas-complicated-journey-pr...
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could it not be cheaper? No molds (or just one bezel mold), far less industrial design, fewer individual wires. Not to mention the QA requirements for testing buttons vs a virtual screen.
I admit I am completely oblivious to those details. Quite interesting. I'd think 5-6 rolling dials and 3-4 buttons in total are still cheaper than a 8" touchscreen but apparently I was wrong.
They're probably cheaper at the small scale - big panel big price - but at the large scale might not be so cheap: Now you have a point of failure for each of those dials/buttons, the housing is more complex/expensive, you need to make replacement parts for all of those buttons, etc. More training for repair technicians, more parts they have to keep in stock. Possibly more damaged phones because each button is a weak point in the phone's housing.
Screen costs trended down pretty aggressively over time so over the course of a couple years it probably ended up being cost-effective even if it wasn't at day 1. If you're already throwing a relatively sizable high-quality panel into your phone making it a bit bigger may not be as much of a bump up in price.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's too much selection bias for this analogy to be particularly strong. Digital cameras are increasingly a niche product that exist mainly to cater to people who specifically want a the "SLR" user experience. If you just want to take decent enough photos, your smartphone's camera today is better than most prosumer DSLRs from like five years ago. I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they h…
> I don't think today's DSLRs have the form factor that they have because it's objectively more usable. It's just the form factor that their self-selected customers want. One piece of evidence in favor of that is that all DSLRs do have big LCD screens on the back and often require a lot of menu diving to access any functionality that didn't exist in cameras before the digital revolution. So on my seven year old Nikon…
I'll just add that mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras mostly became serious tools once electronic viewfinders became good enough that they could reasonably replace optical viewfinders for the most part. (Still not as good but a reasonable compromise given the smaller and lighter bodies they make possible.) As the say the LCD back can provide useful feedback--and are occasionally useful for specific situations when shooting--but at least for handheld shooting they're not often used for framing the subject.
And, to the original point of the discussion, these cameras also have lots of physical buttons and dials which are nice to have when they're properly designed.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
hondas have had voice controls for ~20 years. they're in e.g. the 2004 acura tl. simple voice controls are cost effective and already implemented.
Yes but they're uselessly complex. I've owned a top-of-the-line Ridgeline with voice control for over a year and I still don't remember any of the sequences of specific commands it recognizes. Any car needs to be connected to a central server where the processing occurs. Useful levels of voice recognition just aren't going to happen inside the car.
The problem there is that they try to parse voice as natural language -- if they instead made a simple programming language with a consistent format.. you'd be able to process the voice locally (speech-to-text has been mostly effective since like the 95s) and actually make it memorizable and semi-explorable.
And if you added a semicolon-keyword like "over" for radio, you'd avoid the issue where it waits a minute to see if you finished, making usage agonizingly slow.
But we somehow still haven't reached the point where people/corps finally realize that we simply can't parse natural language effectively