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Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

autocar.co.uk

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Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#401

Post by akamaozu »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #374
cmckn wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner is a first officer, and frequently describes his job as being a glorified babysitter outside of takeoff and landing. Worth noting that a significant amount of the information pilots use in the cockpit (at major US carriers, at least), things like flight plans, are on an iPad.

... until something goes wrong. Then a touch screen is the last thing you want. An airliner moving uncontrollably is no time to try touching just the right spot of the screen, and avoid touching the wrong spot.

Was team screen til this point.

In critical systems, you want to make sure inputs are easy to use in the worst case scenario.

Even the best of touchscreens can't compare to physical controls in tough times.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#402

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

sneak wrote: post #30
jetrink wrote: post #15

I 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…

I can only conclude from the situation you describe, as well as the fact that most cameras (as cameras, not phones) still lack GPS and sometimes Wi-Fi, that a great many industrial designers are trend-following, uncreative bores. Most modern car interior controls are horrible (Tesla’s giant laggy touchscreen included).

Laggy? The Tesla Model 3 touchscreen is anything but.

I had many reservations about the touchscreen prior to ownership, however I don't really have any complaints now. You get used to it, Tesla's specifically is not laggy, and most critical stuff is on the steering wheel/stalk anyway.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#403

Post by Wistar »

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.

This past January, I rented an Audi Q7. It was brand new and had the Audi Virtual Cockpit which took me a full two days to grasp to the point where I could use it safely and required me to pull over several times to figure something out. Worse, the rental agency had removed the owner's manuals so I was without reference. One of the goofiest things was that the navigation moving map would mysteriously stop moving--allowing the car (me) to drive off the edge of the map--and didn't allow me to move the map, to re-center by touch, while the car was in motion, instead presenting an alert saying that the action was unavailable while the car was moving. As I was driving in an unfamiliar city, this issue forced me to stop several times so that I could see the map surrounding the car, it was simply horrible.

To complicate things, the rental agency had bound the two key fobs together with steel cable. This caused the car to arbitrarily recall the user settings from one key or the other--presumably whichever key it happened to recognize first. This had the effect of making the system behave even more randomly as it unevenly switched back and forth between the two user profiles each time I started the car. Every time I'd think I had tamed the user preferences, the "other" set would get loaded, changing the preferences. I solved this by removing the key battery from one of the keys but even with just a single profile, it was a remarkably trying experience and one that seemed to have been engineered for frivolous, show-offy, reasons rather than solid, task-solving reasons.

Mercedes-Benz has, in recent years, also made their UX very flashy and fiddly even though they are not using a touch screen. Just tuning a radio station is a multi-step process requiring the traversal of several menus but lacking the feedback in the sub-menus that is needed to let the user know they have actually made a selection. The user must come back all the way to the top of the menu structure to see if the selection they made two or three steps earlier has had any effect.

Just give me a dedicated knob.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#404

Post by downerending »

cosmotic wrote: post #270
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…

> 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 replace the hardware. They also enable the completion of hardware design before the interface design is completed. While the plastic molds and mechanical designs are worked out, the interface and software development can continue.

That sounds good, but for some reason, design of "virtual" controls always seems to end up far inferior to physical ones. Perhaps the thought is "We'll just toss something out there and we can fix it later", as opposed to "We only have one shot at this so we better get it right".

I'm reminded as well of web "app" interfaces. In the early days, with relatively fixed controls, one could often navigate sites more easily since there just weren't that many ways they could work. Now, with a blizzard of JS UI kits and an oh-so-wonderful variety of ways of doing everything, each site works differently. And it's not an improvement.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#405

Post by audunw »

anderspitman wrote: post #280

I work in data visualization. Every programmer who gets into datavis goes through a "3D all the things" phase where they look around and realize that 3D visualizations aren't used in a lot of areas where it seems like they should. Eventually you realize that there are big tradeoffs and 3D is very difficult to get right for the human brain. Touchscreens are similar. The appeal is obvious. Screens are space efficient,…

> Imagine if you had 4 extra physical buttons, a scroll wheel, and a slider all sitting on your wrist, and your phone and apps were designed in such a way that you could map these to whatever you wanted.

Well this is kind of what Tesla is doing isn't it? You have some general purpose scroll-wheels/buttons on the steering wheel

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#406

Post by 1123581321 »

dublin wrote: post #329
setr wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't use the market as an example of it, because the producers shifted in (almost) unison, and bundled it with other more valuable features. The same thing happened with 3DTVs -- the manufacturers all decided this was the next big thing, and shifted all their production to it, and it turns out.. it wasn't. But we as consumers had a 5-year drought where you simply couldn't buy a new TV that wasn't 3D. The same is…

The Macbook touchbar holds a likely never-to-be-surpassed record for "The World's Most Useless Touchscreen". I literally cannot imagine how this UI abortion got to market. To me, the touchbar was the canary that Apple's innovation days were done. Sometimes, it's really NOT a good thing to "think different"(ly)...

Apple replaced the function keys because they were increasingly disused (and to increase the BOM and consequently the margin in absolute dollars.) The Touch Bar gets used more often. The default modes aren’t to everyone’s taste, but they’re easy for inexperienced users (based on our user observation) and power users like the potential to customize (check out BetterTouchTool if you haven’t yet.)

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#407

Post by F_J_H »

I see the benefits of touch screens, but I really miss tactile controls, like the temperature controls on my Dad's 1978 GMC pickup truck, which is the vehicle I learned to drive in. Three super simple, super intuitive slider type controls for all temperature settings: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/iVtb4z2QozY/maxresdefault.jpg

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#408

Post by stevehawk »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #369
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…

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.

The arrogance of that statement is amazing. I recently bought an iPad for the first time in 5+(?) years.. before multi touch and pressure sensitive screens. I have no f'n clue what I'm doing anymore. I accidentally had Safari running two windows side by side with no idea how to stop that. I'm still not sure what I did to make it go back to one window..

My friends and I decided to try out a (new to us) game which required Microsoft Store / Xbox PC Game Console or whatever the shit it is. 4 of us cannot figure out how to add someone as a friend. It's not in any menu anywhere. I can follow, I can favorite.. I have no idea how to "friend".. which means we can't figure out how to invite people to games.

I'm convinced if Silicon Valley were to design car interfaces I'd be stuck in some sort of pay per action dark pattern captivity hell.

And as a student pilot nothing scares me more than touch screen controls. Maybe I spend too much time down low in the thermals but it's so much easier to hold on to a knob and turn it, while counting clicks, than trying to press a touch screen and hope you hit the right finger sized button the right number of times to change radio frequencies. Different story on heavy planes since they don't bounce around as much as GA planes but it sucks to fight the fight while trying to maintain control/coordination.

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