Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#362Look 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 am not a pilot, but it seems like MFD (multi-function displays, a sort of touch screen with touch points at the edge of the screen) are very common even in fighter planes.
Yes, the basic controls do not change. But more advanced functionality is easier presented through menus and screens which guide you through a process -- instead of adding tons of switches for every possible function.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Touch screen controls in automotive environment is such a bad idea Touch screen controls are a bad idea in general when the form factor has space for adequate physical controls. The only time they're an acceptable compromise is for small devices like phones. Even then careful use of a small number of buttons can be a great improvement.
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…
> 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.
Touchscreens aren't necessary for any of that, though. There are alternative, better UI interfaces. For instance: f-key driven soft menus. Those have tactile feedback, have reliable key-press detection, and can be operated with regular gloves.
The only situation in a car where I could see a touchscreen being the right option are cases where a soft keyboard is needed.
> 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.... Features like this are more than adequately served by touchscreen controls.
My Honda has a button-operated menu for that, and that's better than a touchscreen.
> you would have a worse UI if there was a hardware slider for this on the dash.
I never said that cars should have a dedicated, physical control for each function. What I said was touchscreens are unnecessary and sub-optimal.
Commonly used functions should have dedicated physical controls, especially those that are likely to be used while in motion (driving controls, climate control, basic audio stuff). The next most common set of functions should be implemented with a combination of shortcut keys and f-keys. Finally, seldom-used functions (such as configuration) should be accessed with f-key driven menus.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#364Eminently 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.
Voice control sucks IMO, even though a lot of people now grow up with Alexa and similar and adapt to the technology. Why does it suck, just like some "smart" buttons? Because it's not obvious what it can do. You have to learn the vocabulary it understands and its other limitations (tone etc.). For example, I tried to get my Tesla to text one of my contacts recently and failed. I didn't know whether it just didn't und…
not obvious to you. I suspect younger generations won't have much of an issue with this, similar to how millenials learned how to utilize google search easily while it confounded their parents
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#365Good, the Honda touchscreen controls in my 2016 Pilot are incredibly awful.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#366I'm glad they're going in this direction. Mostly all BMWs use the screen for simply displaying informational content and for input and navigation it uses a multi-direction knob right by the arm rest and it's best most intuitive way to navigate the screen imo. Car screens are either matte and less responsive or glossy and more responsive but less visible in sunlight.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#367Look 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.
I wouldn't fly on a touchscreen plane, imagine Boeing going corporate with their airplane screens, nope, nope, nope.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#368I will never understand how this trend started in the first place. If you look at e.g. digital cameras, they all have touch screens these days, but they also still have buttons and dials everywhere. The one in front of me has eight physical buttons, seven dials and a power switch. The reason is obvious: when you're taking photos, you don't want to be looking down at a screen; you want to be focused on the task at han…
They make cars significantly cheaper to produce - both in terms of parts and construction time. Evey button you lose is a button you don't have source and install when building the car. There's less wiring, less replacement parts to stock. It's a win in all kinds of situations for the manufacturer. It's no coincidence that the company with most manufacturing issues - Tesla - also went with completely touchscreen base…
The cost argument should also apply to the camera manufacturers and yet they have enough common sense to not make decisions that (to me) are user-hostile. Teslas are in a different boat - it seems that whatever they do, people will still line up to buy their stuff, at least for the time being.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#369Look 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…
The problem here is not with the technology - it's from the people implementing it. Instead of leaving the design and software to tech companies, we have car companies trying to do it on their own.
The result is terribly designed software that looks like it's from 2000.
Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls
#370I remember years back there was a company that had and inflatable layer ontop of touch screens for flexible "buttons". I'm sure there's ergonomic pros/cons of different kinds of physical switches but seems like we need to move on better touch screen haptics.