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Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

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Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#111

Post by rTX5CMRXIfFG »

zeedude wrote: post #92
flyinghamster wrote: post #39

I think one of the most frustrating aspects of this whole kerfluffle is the automakers' longstanding willingness to ignore customers and double down at any pushback. It's downright stupid that it has taken this level of screaming from customers to roll back a design choice that should never have been made.

It’s all about the bottom line. Touch screens consolidate a ton of otherwise expensive switch gear. Going back to physical knobs and buttons means going back to paying for engineering, assembling, testing, etc.

From a product and even financial standpoint, the trade-off doesn’t make sense. All the litigation that could occur due to accidents caused by a less safe design plus the reputational damage that an inexcellent product could cause to the brand sounds so expensive to me.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#112

Post by evntdrvn »

netsharc wrote: post #75
exabrial wrote: post #17

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…

Cockpit UI like on the F/A-18 are called Multifunction Displays or MFDs, but wouldn't they be terrible UI as well, until you memorize the sequence of buttons to do something? You'd still have to look at the display to see what the submenu options are. Apparently they're available for flight sim games, if I had the time and know-how, it'd be neat to bu one (e.g. on AliExpress) and integrate it to my car: https://www.y…

The way they're implemented, I've found them pretty intuitive.

Avionics manufacturers are generally pretty serious about Ux. Or at least the test pilots berate them into caring, when I was in Flight Test Engineering I remember a lot of "spicy" feedback about avionics usability issues getting sent back to the manufacturers lol

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#113

Post by snow_mac »

I like a big display with buttons on the side. I like getting to see the song name, the station and some of that digital info, I like Apple Maps on Apple car play. Those are nice features. I love the back up camera display. But I have to have a button or knob to adjust temp, audio, next track, etc... because while those things are helpful, when I'm going down the highway and I need to adjust while paying attention jumping between screens and the road sucksssssss

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#115

Post by yellowapple »

Gigachad wrote: post #93
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than touch screens are those touch buttons (you know, where the thing is just printed on the outside of the TV). 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 touch…

Thank god the touchbar is finally gone from the MacBook. It was such a strange delight to use the new model and have the media keys reliably work.

I didn't mind the touchbar as a concept, but the implementation was terrible and it should never have replaced any keys.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#116

Post by wildrhythms »

colordrops wrote: post #94

This keeps coming up on Hacker News. It's not that drivers hate touch screens. It's that most of them are terribly implemented. People hated smartphones until Apple released the iPhone. Just think about smartphones before that. The UX was horrid. I suspect most people in this thread piling onto the hate don't own a recent model Tesla. I know that some owners aren't fans, but most are. There are three things that make…

Taking your eyes off the road to adjust the AC is a terrible UX. And as for 'voice commands' bless your heart to imagine every car doesn't have screaming kids in the back seat or a driver with a heavy accent. I want a knob.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#117

Post by hunter2_ »

exabrial wrote: post #17

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…

> tactile buttons around the perimeter ... but the options can change

"Soft keys" [0] are what you're describing. Very commonly seen on ATMs.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_key

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#118

Post by xpe »

civilized wrote: post #103
zeedude wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all about the bottom line. Touch screens consolidate a ton of otherwise expensive switch gear. Going back to physical knobs and buttons means going back to paying for engineering, assembling, testing, etc.

Profiting off of a less safe product that kills people could be seen as an egregious moral deficiency.

Indeed. Not uncommon but still unacceptable.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#119

Post by 8ytecoder »

roland35 wrote: post #21
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #15

"Although they look fancy, Farah said that carmakers can purchase screens for less than $50, making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls."

Having designed electronics, I absolutely appreciate how much a pain in the butt buttons are (maybe that's why they are called buttons!). It isn't just the cost... Each button requires mechanical design and tooling, graphics, manufacturing, etc etc. Plus no one is ever satisfied with the "feel" or tactical properties. But as a driver I absolutely hate touchscreens! Funniest button story.. one time we were working on…

I absolutely love the buttons in Porsches and Mazdas.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#120

Post by StillBored »

Its just bad UI, companies in the past tested their products and solicited feedback before casting it in stone. Be that OS vendors, or car manufactures. I'm not sure where to lay the blame, but maybe a lot of it has to do with modern CAD, etc which allows most of the design to be done virtually before anyone actually tries it out.

So its not just an argument of touchscreens vs buttons, its how you interact with those buttons too. My pet peve as a driver of a car that still has a _key_ is that pretty much all the automakers have standardized on a single start button to reflect a state machine with 4+ distinct states and the process for transitioning between the states varies slightly from vehicle to vehicle. And now you might have to differentiate between short pushes and long pushes, and spend a moment considering what state its in before performing it. A tactile knob with off-acc-on would probably be just fine but wouldn't have been as "cool" and costs $.10 more a car.

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