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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

#301

Post by Pasorrijer »

Spivak wrote: post #299
m463 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hope these kinds of situations would lead to a market opportunity for someone to come in and do it right... but it rarely does.

You can't create a market opportunity for something without it being a differentiating feature. 2022 Honda Civic but with physical buttons probably doesn't move the needle because car buyers are price sensitive and because 2022 Honda Civic with screen is still better than alternatives.

Funny you should mention the Honda Civic...

I had a 2017 Honda Civic Hatchback. First year of the new model design, it had a touch sensitive volume control... After that, I think it was the 2019 and up all Honda's came with a volume knob AS A DIFFERENTIATOR because the UX was so bad without it.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#302

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Curiously, for some people low-tech is not better. I.e. used to have an Amana RadarRange which had two knobs - one for power and one for time. You turned them until you saw what you wanted on the display.

But my pre-reading children couldn't operate it. I'd say "nuke it for a minute and a half" and they'd twist the knob and ask "Is that enough? Which way should I turn it?" See they couldn't do the math to know if 45 seconds was more or less than a minute and a half.

If it'd been buttons I could have said "Press 90 seconds" or whatever and they could do that. Later when we got a different microwave they had a better time.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#303

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Arrath wrote: post #231
woopwoop wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 substant…

The wild variability in boot times for the entertainment center is what gets me. Sometimes, my bluetooth will start playing immediately, other times the car company's logo will grace the screen for a good 30 seconds before I can interact with it at all. There doesn't seem to be any relation to frequency of starting it up, time since the last drive, etc.

Running fsck. We're now in the era of low effort embedded systems. Just slap Linux on it and don't bother tuning for usability in non-desktop use cases.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#304

Post by windowsrookie »

malfist wrote: post #227
akeck wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Mazda has a policy of no touchscreens in their vehicles.

They have touch screens, but it's minimal, pretty much only usable in the GPS view. 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.

The new Mazdas have no touchscreen and in my opinion it's worse.

Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are designed to be touched. Navigating either without a touchscreen is a horrible experience and requires significantly more steps than just touching the item you want on the screen.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#305

Post by massysett »

speedgoose wrote: post #263
bobthepanda wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some tools are just not good for the job. At least to me, I haven‘t seen a compelling reasons that touchscreens replacing analog car controls isn‘t a square peg going into a circle hole.

Well, analog controls are not very good to control a gps map or browse a music collection.

I find that a round knob with a push-button click, when coupled with a non-touch screen, is far superior to swiping around on a touchscreen to browse a music collection.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#306

Post by Spivak »

Pasorrijer wrote: post #301
Spivak wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't create a market opportunity for something without it being a differentiating feature. 2022 Honda Civic but with physical buttons probably doesn't move the needle because car buyers are price sensitive and because 2022 Honda Civic with screen is still better than alternatives.

Funny you should mention the Honda Civic... I had a 2017 Honda Civic Hatchback. First year of the new model design, it had a touch sensitive volume control... After that, I think it was the 2019 and up all Honda's came with a volume knob AS A DIFFERENTIATOR because the UX was so bad without it.

Right but that's a different market force! Customer feedback is really effective at redressing provably bad UX but it's a lot harder for that same change to happen in response to a competing manufacturer because in aggregate such a small thing isn't enough to get someone to switch away from Honda entirely.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#307

Post by zepearl »

izacus wrote: post #191
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.

> I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates. What is allows for is: cost cutting. Not having to install a mask, a button, wire harness and QA everything is a massive manufacturing cost saving. It speeds up production and lowers the amount of components that need to be sourced, installed and later made available for replacement as…

> What is allows for is: cost cutting. Not having to install a mask, a button, wire harness and QA everything is a massive manufacturing cost saving. It speeds up production and lowers the amount of components that need to be sourced, installed and later made available for replacement as part of a service.

I tend to have the same opinion, but at the same time I'm not convinced:

- I bought 1 year ago a new car for 80k $ => that's not cheap and in my opinion putting 4 extra buttons (up/down) or 2 extra knobs to control the temperature of the two front seats wouldn't have been an incredible engineering challenge that would have added hundreds of $ to the cost (which was anyway high).

- we have ~100 buttons that all work reliably on our keyboards, which are connected to our PCs/notebooks with just a single cable => I admit that in a car there is the extra challenge of temperature variance (car parked in the Sahara or somewhere in Iceland), but I cannot think that that's an engineering wonder (worked fine during the last 100 years).

Therefore maybe the trend is driven by designers: make everything shiny & slick, risk of having the own work thrown into the trash when taking a step back to do usability tests vs. physical controls so let's just forget about that.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#308

Post by natdempk »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #302

Curiously, for some people low-tech is not better. I.e. used to have an Amana RadarRange which had two knobs - one for power and one for time. You turned them until you saw what you wanted on the display. But my pre-reading children couldn't operate it. I'd say "nuke it for a minute and a half" and they'd twist the knob and ask "Is that enough? Which way should I turn it?" See they couldn't do the math to know if 45…

Looking at the dial I feel like if you told them to move it to 1:30 or move it to the 30 past the 1, it would be pretty obvious? Wouldn't you have the same issue of having to convert 1:30 to 90 seconds with the other microwave design? I don't understand how the two are different.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#309

Post by nkrisc »

_jal wrote: post #182
tablespoon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Backu…

> As far as I'm concerned, keep your butt warmers and solenoid-driven seat adjustment

My car has these things, controlled by physical buttons and knobs. They're nice features and they don't require a touchscreen to use.

Re: The benefits of “low tech” user interfaces

#310

Post by justsomehnguy »

sfink wrote: post #286

This article strangely undersells the advantages of low tech. It's true that they're not better for everything, but they have advantages well beyond the basic things mentioned. A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens.…

Oh, it is actually worse.

The amount of times when I swiped down from the top (to open the notification shade or whatever it is called now or to refresh the page), the UI shows pulling down the thing fully... and when backs off. I repeat the gesture, but again it goes all the way down and retracts back and nothing happens.

And of course when I don't need that, I just swipe down to go top of the page - it thinks what I actually want to refresh the page. Many comments were lost that way.

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