221–230 of 410 posts
http://images.gtcarlot.com/pictures/48277419.jpg
It's no surprise given that Saab has a history in aerospace.
I totally get why car manufacturers are moving to essentially a big iPad as a replacement for the overall dash (it's like when the iPhone came out and people loved their Blackberry keyboards), but from a function vs form perspective - buttons are way easier.
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As I've gotten older I've become very anti-icon. Just use text!
Text means that you need different versions for different international markets, which causes a lot of additional SKUs and associated logistics costs. And it's not just that, but words with the same meaning can have vastly different lengths depending on language, which may or may not fit in your original design. To name an example: If you have an fan-assisted oven, you can have a small round button labeled 'fan'. In…
If only we could all decide upon a "default" language to use globally, much like a lot of software out there is available only in English which seems to be good enough (almost all programming languages included) for most cases.
Then again, I'm the kind of person who finds most localizations in my native language to be uncomfortable to use and attempts by the academia to force people to use translated IT terms pointless - that will only lead to more confusion.
Of course, not everyone knows multiple languages so maybe that's not the best argument, since we should be accomodating to many people if possible. And then there's the fact that I might have to learn Mandarin eventually if such an initiative came to pass.
Reminded me of my favorite article. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi... I'm willing to pay extra to avoid touch screens in my cars, washing machines, door locks, and personal computers. I can't be the only one!
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.
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.
Touchscreen for other things: android auto, apple car play (which provide maps) and more complicated user settings (such as whether you want the lights to stay on after you turn off the car for a while)
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.
I also imagine this trend is bad from the ergonomics / RSI perspective. For generations, we've been using various kinds of per-appliance controls, with various shapes, sizes and stiffnesses. Since the past 10 years almost all of them have been replaced by a flat piece of glass. People are increasingly doing only a couple of motions with their hands throughout the day without any variety (tap/drag without any tactile…
I use to have a 2006 Saab. I LOVED how it had mechanical buttons for everything on the dash. http://images.gtcarlot.com/pictures/48277419.jpg It's no surprise given that Saab has a history in aerospace. I totally get why car manufacturers are moving to essentially a big iPad as a replacement for the overall dash (it's like when the iPhone came out and people loved their Blackberry keyboards), but from a function vs f…
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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 believe Mazda has a policy of no touchscreens in their vehicles.
They do have a rotary dial and push button that controls the display, so no touching it. Makes it a lot simpler when your UI designers are restricted to left/right movement and button push. Can't hide things all over the place and under deeply nested menus.
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That's a great point about looking to music equipment for UX ideas. If you want to see what happens when a design team puts serious effort into building a satisfying and effective interface, look at electronic music devices.
Those mixer boards you see are horribly complicated, but with the thousands of knobs and buttons most anyone can figure out how to mute a microphone in a few minutes or less. The touchscreen versions can be more complicated - but since they also have the ability to change the knobs to presets they may be more useful to actual sound engineers.
One important aspect is that with tactile controls one barely needs presets, though, except for recall. Mixing done from scratch is quite fast, even when compared to presets, so I would argue that there is a significant tradeoff when going digital.
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> Flatness in phones works because we can use our full attention I very much agree with you, and would like to add that flatness in phones is a feature because today phones are pocket computers, and computers should be able to provide any arbitrary UI to function as such. Cars on the other hand are not a computer nor are they intended to function as one. The fact that modern cars expose part of their on-board compute…
I've heard Teslas described as "iPads with Wheels".
