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The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

uxdesign.cc

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Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#181

Post by woopwoop »

arky527 wrote: post #5

Modern cars seem to be moving towards all controls on a touch screen somewhere. I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates. Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.

My toyota Corolla has a touch screen for interacting with audio. It has the following delightful features:

- latency

- it has a boot procedure when you turn the car on. While this happens, the controls have quite substantial latency. However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio.

- there is a knob for adjusting volume, but it's still part of the same system as the rest of it. There is still substantial latency to this control, especially immediately upon turning the car on. However even a little latency here is really annoying, because one naturally adjusts volume via trial and error.

- if you've paired the car with your phone via Bluetooth, it immediately sends a message to your phone to start playing whatever audio was played most recently at whatever the current volume is. I wrote a tasker routine to intercept this, but an android patch a while back helpfully broke this and I haven't bothered fixing it.

All of this combines for a user experience dramatically worse than an aux cord. It's kind of spectacular in its terribleness. And this is an otherwise great car.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#182

Post by _jal »

tablespoon wrote: post #138
baobob wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily the tide seems to be turning: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/opinion/touch-screens-car...

> Luckily the tide seems to be turning: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/opinion/touch-screens-car... We can hope, but there's reason to be pessimistic: > With traffic fatalities spiking over the past few years and with no real plan for how to make screens less distracting, we seem to have entered into the type of brutal acquiescence that’s common in the tech era; car manufacturers will keep putting bigger and more…

> we, the consumers, will continue to buy them.

Who's this "we"?

I'm in the pre-buy stage, it looks like my record of non-car-ownership will end at 23 years. (My last car was stolen from a SOMA lot in 1999.)

It does look like I'm buying used and IC, because I will not have a touch screen. I've driven basically every model of car you can rent, and some of them are less offensive than others, but they're all ass. Backup assist is vaguely nice, but I learned to parallel park before they existed, so I don't really care. And everything else about them is actively worse.

The UI is such a weird thing to cheap out on. As far as I'm concerned, keep your butt warmers and solenoid-driven seat adjustment, I want physical knobs I don't have to look at to use.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#183

Post by corrral »

30944836 wrote: post #139
arky527 wrote: post #5

Modern cars seem to be moving towards all controls on a touch screen somewhere. I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates. Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.

>Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road. I understand this concern and opinion. I just wish that people who had this opinion realized that their car has a very modern voice interface that can reliably understand commands for temperature changes. I know, I know, it's not the buttons you…

> I understand this concern and opinion. I just wish that people who had this opinion realized that their car has a very modern voice interface that can reliably understand commands for temperature changes.

Very new, expensive cars, sure.

Meanwhile, most cars are shifting at least some controls to touch, because they have to have a big screen anyway (backup camera requirements).

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#184

Post by tomxor »

rob74 wrote: post #169
nkrisc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The touch screens are the only thing keeping me on dino juice cars. I want to go electric, but they all have these awful touchscreens! I don’t want to navigate a menu to change the temperature or turn on a seat warmer. I’m just not buying an EV until there’s one that doesn’t rely on a giant touch screen for everything or I can’t buy an ICE vehicle anymore.

I think that's true only as long as the only electric cars you have driven are Teslas. The BMW i3 has pretty much resisted this tendency. Ok, it's already a pretty old design at this point and getting phased out, but it has lots of physical buttons (even for the seat warmer!). And I don't think electric cars that are variants of existing petrol cars (which are more and more common) will eliminate the physical control…

Made me check that one out, it's actually not an insane price, it competes with most new normal-person petrol cars... I mean I still wouldn't buy one new, and that's still a bit of a dodgy range, but maybe in ten years there will finally be an affordable 2nd hand market and some infra to make it reliable. In the mean time I will continue to run my petrol car into the ground like a good holistic environmentalist.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#185

Post by 2143 »

jansan wrote: post #9

OT: I have never before read the word "aughts" and had to look it up. Turns out this describes the first decade of the 21st century (or of any century?), i.e. the years 2000 to 2009. The British seem to use the word "noughties".

I too learnt of "noughties" recently. Never heard "aughts" before.

But then again, English isn't my first language.

Now that I think about it, I've heard people here say, for example, "1 nought 1", "1 nought 2", "1 nought 3" etc for 101, 102, 103, and so on.

Of course, I always thought they said "1 'not' 1", and not "1 'nought' 1", and didn't ponder too much into it, even though neither of them made sense to me.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#186

Post by danans »

The Awair Element indoor air quality monitor has an interesting low-tech yet information dense physical display.

It's a low resolution matrix of LEDs behind a plastic facade that displays current air quality measurements pretty simply but effectively.

It's a clever design choice for many reasons, not just because it lowers the BOM of the device, but because people already have enough computer/phone/TV high resolution displays in their living spaces, and in contrast the Awair looks somewhat elegant in contrast.

There are some reasonable critiques regarding the accuracy or effectiveness of these consumer indoor air monitors, but I get far more questions about the Awair than I do about any other devices I have. Some of that is its novelty, but some of it also is the minimal UX.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#187

Post by Syonyk »

causi wrote: post #87
arky527 wrote: post #5

Modern cars seem to be moving towards all controls on a touch screen somewhere. I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates. Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.

It seems that Star Trek was incredibly prescient when they depicted literally every interface as a touchscreen.

It's more the case that Star Trek's lack of budget has driven the modern world in that direction, because that was clearly "the future."

Apparently they wanted the Apollo style space-age interfaces with all the knobs and switches. Just, they didn't have the budget, and paint was cheaper.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/how-star-trek-artist...

> According to Michael Okuda, original Star Trek art director Matt Jefferies had practically no budget. "He had to invent an inexpensive, but believable solution," he told Ars. "The spacecraft of the day, such as the Gemini capsules, were jammed full of toggle switches and gauges. If he had had the money to buy those things, the Enterprise would have looked a lot like that."

> What could be simpler to make than a flat surface with no knobs, buttons, switches, or other details? Okuda designed a user interface dominated large type and sweeping, curved rectangles. The style was first employed in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for the Enterprise-A, and came to be referred to as "okudagrams." The graphics could be created on transparent colored sheets very cheaply, though as ST:TNG progressed, control panels increasingly used video panels or added post-production animations.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#188

Post by franga2000 »

rob74 wrote: post #169
nkrisc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The touch screens are the only thing keeping me on dino juice cars. I want to go electric, but they all have these awful touchscreens! I don’t want to navigate a menu to change the temperature or turn on a seat warmer. I’m just not buying an EV until there’s one that doesn’t rely on a giant touch screen for everything or I can’t buy an ICE vehicle anymore.

I think that's true only as long as the only electric cars you have driven are Teslas. The BMW i3 has pretty much resisted this tendency. Ok, it's already a pretty old design at this point and getting phased out, but it has lots of physical buttons (even for the seat warmer!). And I don't think electric cars that are variants of existing petrol cars (which are more and more common) will eliminate the physical control…

I regularly drive a variety of electric cars (renault, smart, bmw, ford, VW) and besides the Smart For* series, which is cost-down so much that it doesn't even have a touchscreen, all of the cars have at least one feature available exclusively through the touchscreen. One of the most infuriating is Reanult's ZOË, which has really good physical controls for absolutely everything, except volume. That's the one not-driving-related thing I need to be able to adjust while moving! Even the 2008 Scenic dinosaur-burner that I stupidly bought during the pandemic has better controls than that...

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#189

Post by RyEgswuCsn »

arky527 wrote: post #5

Modern cars seem to be moving towards all controls on a touch screen somewhere. I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates. Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.

Agreed. I feel people should start replacing touchscreens with physical buttons/dials with small LED screens on them --- their functions and behaviours can be programmed to change on demand while retaining tactile feedbacks.
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