51–60 of 1001 posts
Physical buttons can still be used without constantly looking at them, this is a huge difference.
Touchscreens should be considered as a low-cost fallback when better solutions are unpractical or too costly.
They rarely provide a better experience.
Pro Tip: So do ER Doctors and Insurance Companies. What would be best is something along the lines of a hybrid aircraft controls. See F/A-18 Hornet cockpit. Basically tactile buttons around the perimeter (maybe just side or bottom for consumer), but the options can change. Also for consumers, touchscreen should be a value-add to tactile controls, with hardware buttons as primary. So you could touch-scroll with a fing…
Touch screens are also pretty terrible for older people. Vision and fine motor skills both degenerate. Without tactile feedback, it is hard for older people to determine if they've successfully clicked on something. Gestures can be tough to teach and successfully implement without error.
I have no idea why, I'm fluent with touchscreens in the usual way but something in my brain just.... I don't know. Theoretically it should be the same, right? Except it feels horrible and wrong and I even have trouble trying to find the button.
Probably because I'm vision-impaired and an actual touchscreen is usually backlit and easier to see, while for physical buttons I've always compensated by using my sense of touch more (move hand towards general area of button, narrow it down with my fingertips).
The lack of the tactile click also certainly has something to do with it as pointed out above.
I'd actually be really interested to know from any UX design people here that work on this kind of thing - am I an outlier or does everyone hate them?
Nothing wrong with touchscreens, just don't rely exclusively on them for basic vehicle operations! Thoughtless trend-following caused all these UX complaints in the first place, and it sounds like the automakers are hoping it will fix them as well. It won't.
Going against a trend and being wrong hurts more than following the trend and being wrong.
I also find it really difficult to wrap my head around how Tesla's turn signal buttons on their "yoke" could possibly have made it through any testing. Did none of the people they tested it on use turn signals?? Did they just not test at all? It seems like the smallest effort of UX testing would've immediately pointed out how terrible this is
Tbh it feels like ultimately it's just companies deciding to skimp out on design. Tight deadlines and lazy cost-cutting measures probably contribute
I think this mostly applies to bad or cheap touch screens, which most cars today have. I used to be strongly in the anti touch screen camp, but after getting a car where the touch screen is basically an iPad in terms of display quality and touch input quality and size, I surprisingly don’t really mind it. Good voice control also helps a ton.
There was a company (Tactus Technology - now defunct) that had a "morphing" touch screen wherein the surface of the screen could be raised up to provide tactile feedback about "where" your fingers are on the screen (e.g. 'raised' keys for a keyboard [0]). I recall this being "the next big thing" in touch screens about 10 years ago but the tech didn't seem to go anywhere. For small screens such as your phone it was pr…
Part of the problem of textured screens is that you have to be able to touch the interface without activating anything. That's newer enough tech that the prices are probably just now coming down.
For some reason that I take no credit for, my voice works perfectly with most voice recognition systems I've tried. I still hate encountering it on an 800 number. My favorite story, though, was when someone left a voice message for me in Vietnamese, and Google's VR system tried to interpret it as English. "How about goddamn lunch?" is the thing I remember.
For some reason that I take no credit for, my voice works perfectly with most voice recognition systems I've tried. I still hate encountering it on an 800 number. My favorite story, though, was when someone left a voice message for me in Vietnamese, and Google's VR system tried to interpret it as English. "How about goddamn lunch?" is the thing I remember.
Pro Tip: So do ER Doctors and Insurance Companies. What would be best is something along the lines of a hybrid aircraft controls. See F/A-18 Hornet cockpit. Basically tactile buttons around the perimeter (maybe just side or bottom for consumer), but the options can change. Also for consumers, touchscreen should be a value-add to tactile controls, with hardware buttons as primary. So you could touch-scroll with a fing…
Someone should do something like this smart knob[0]. It looks incredible. [0] https://youtu.be/ip641WmY4pA?t=58
But for the purposes of this discussion, having a couple three of those on the dashboard and using them a bit like radial menus would probably split the difference pretty well.