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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

#451

Post by prox »

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.

I pray you all read the ux bible About Face on interaction design.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#452

Post by deskamess »

sudosysgen wrote: post #437
robocat wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple physical knobs and buttons add multiple points of failure: moving parts fail and even worse, they often fail intermittently. We all have that experience. Even optical encoders fail (I’ve had one fail on an engine, and obviously consumer mice, or the connectors fail). A modern touch screen is superbly reliable because it has no moving parts, and it can be tested. The (consumer grade) iPad touchscreen is very…

Anecdotaly, my touch screen devices's screens are less durable than my mechanical keyboard, but I agree with your overall points, touch screens can be made incredibly durable.

Very interesting... I wonder what it would take for a touchscreen keyboard to be as reliable or live as long as a mechanical keyboard. Maybe it already does, but my mental picture and experience of phone screens getting flaky, and taking secondary+ swipes does not give me the confidence a mechanical keyboard does.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#453

Post by astrodust »

PaulHoule wrote: post #332
CivBase wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A plane isn't a good analogy for a car. Airplanes have keypads that control complex functions on a screen, going from that kind of keypad to a touchscreen is logical. In the case of cars, a touchpad is overkill for controlling the cabin temperature, stereo volume, etc.

It's logical? It's absurd. You can usually pull over a car and get out in the case of a critical hardware failure. There is rarely such a luxury in a plane.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#455

Post by anderspitman »

audunw wrote: post #405
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

I've never driven a Tesla, but if so that's cool.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#456

Post by astrodust »

WalterBright wrote: post #420
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…

> Touch screens will hopefully never make it into any critical pilot systems Touch screens in the cockpit seem like madness to me. Cockpits sometimes fill with smoke and the pilot has to be able to find and operate the controls. Ever notice that the flap levers have little flaps on top of them? The nosewheel steering control has a little tire on the top? That's so the pilot knows without looking what his hands are on…

Not just smoke. During explosive decompression the air turns to thick fog, and that's when you'll need to fumble around for the correct controls the most.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#457

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

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 thing I'd like to see more of is OLED buttons (Optimus Keyboard style). Physical, clicky, mechanical buttons, but each button is a screen. MFD buttons already change their function depending on what mode the screen is in, having the button also be an icon of what it will do can be very nice.

Otherwise I agree. You need the use of the interface to be as automatic as possible, and exploiting muscle memory & tactile feedback are very important for that. Touch screens fail there.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#458

Post by WWLink »

GordonS wrote: post #277
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…

Totally agree. I have Dell monitors, which are fantastic in every way bar one - they have invisible, capacitive buttons at the bottom right of the bezel. I literally have to put my face right up beside it and squint to have any idea where the buttons are. You can't easily see where they are, and you get no feedback at all when you press on them, and it seems to be 50/50 whether a press is registered. Horrible, horrib…

The newer ones ditched the capacitive buttons for regular pushbuttons. Unfortunately being budget constrained (or profit motivated) the buttons are the cheap kind that move your monitor when you poke at them (and make creaky sounds of course, to compliment the creaky sound the monitor stand makes haha).

Still, it's an improvement.

Re: Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls

#460

Post by avs733 »

bonestamp2 wrote: post #292
avs733 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lower parts count as well. More commonality possibilities between vehicles are possible. the ability to add and remove features at different prive points without having to add/remove as many physical parts is huge. They price compete on bolts and screws...removing a button is a huge cost savings when multiplied by you Munro and Associates is a company that does reverse engineering and costing work and it's wildly int…

Ya, Volvo has gone to a unified interface for their whole lineup. The standard stuff can be controlled with a few knobs and buttons and all the minor differences between models and trim levels are controlled on screen. I'm sure it saves them a ton since the part count would be very low now. They've done a pretty good job at it too, but it needs to be customizable to be great. If I ordered the surround camera option,…

I would think that would be where good context aware software would come into play.

Shouldn't it just automatically show the surround camera when I am in reverse or in some parking mode? I feel like that could be a setting or a soft button that appears when appropriate.

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