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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

#481

Post by concordDance »

bottlepalm wrote: post #428
bombolo wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No amount of UX genius can make a touchscreen visible when the sun is glaring on it. For the Teslas records, it might be because they're exclusively used for short urban trips.

The roof, back and back side windows on a Tesla are tinted, how are you getting screen glare? I've never had that issue.

I expect the person you're replying to is speculating rather than speaking from experience. People tend to opine a lot more on Teslas than other cars when they haven't driven them.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#482

Post by fps_doug »

IceWreck wrote: post #421
jjav wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. No, that's wrong. Problem with touchscreens is that (1) you need to look at them and (2) there is no tactile feedback of whether you pressed it or not and (3) you need to hover your arm in a moving car at just the right spot. Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems. If the ac…

Why not have haptic feedback like in phones

That solves that one problem, but you still get the feedback only when you pressed it, you cannot feel where the button is without looking. I can blindly turn the AC on or off, adjust the fan speed, turn on the hazard lights and adjust the volume of the radio in my car, because it's all good old buttons and knobs. How is that supposed to work with a touch screen?

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#483

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

riverdweller wrote: post #454

Tesla unilaterally decided to push out a refactored UI to my old Model S a few months ago, changing the location of numerous functions to new sub-menu paths, and rendering years of muscle memory useless. Not only do I have to re-learn where everything is, but older memories interfere and confuse every time I try to access an infrequently used function. This experience has been irritating at best. It has felt extremel…

The phone and desktop OS user experience has now infected cars.

"We must change things otherwise our work is not visible."

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#484

Post by xattt »

bradgessler wrote: post #413
jjav wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what? You've got physical buttons? Big whoop. That physical button that takes 500ms to respond is still as dangerous. No, that's wrong. Problem with touchscreens is that (1) you need to look at them and (2) there is no tactile feedback of whether you pressed it or not and (3) you need to hover your arm in a moving car at just the right spot. Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems. If the ac…

> Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems > Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control I never understand the "you don't have to look at buttons" argument—my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and pre…

> I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it

Even if that’s the case, you can lightly drag your finger across a row of buttons, and remember that the button is the third one in without taking your eyes off the road.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#485

Post by nologic01 »

There is plenty of room on a car's dashboard to separate the vital, tactile, muscle memory UI from the informative, visual, reconfigurable, and essentially optional UI.

Touchscreen craze is a suboptimal choice not out of some serious constraint.

What the article points at is just another manifestation of market arrangements (the relative power of manufacturers versus the information and power of consumers) that are slow to generate the counterwailing forces needed to correct course.

A decade of excess accidents here, a decade of screen addiction there and pretty soon you talk about serious negative impact.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#486

Post by DanielHB »

amluto wrote: post #252
sircastor wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because it was written by under-experienced software "engineers." I used to be an infotainment software engineer for an Auto maker. There’s this idea in the software industry that because the software behaves poorly on your car’s system, it must’ve been written poorly by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. In my experience it was almost always a matter of the hardware being stretched way past its limits.…

I'm willing to credit this type of feature creep for some of the problem, but only some. Decades ago, we had hardware that was so much less capable than anything anyone has put in a car in ten years that the comparison is absurd. Nonetheless, those old systems were often very capable of doing useful things, and the UIs were often very, very fast by modern standards. And a lot of this was that the software stack was t…

if you make the UI software more performant the sourcing team just picks a cheaper SoC in order to cut costs. There is little incentive to bend your ass backwards to make performant software when cutting SoC costs doesn't come up on your team's KPIs for upper management

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#487

Post by PetitPrince »

onion2k wrote: post #422
bradgessler wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems > Given that with a physical button you didn't have to take your eyes off the road and given the tactile feedback you know for sure you activated/pressed/moved the control I never understand the "you don't have to look at buttons" argument—my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and pre…

my car has lots of physical buttons and to push them, I briefly have to look at the console, find the button, and press it For things that you do regularly the button should be optimized to not be in the middle of a cluster. Ideally it'll be somewhere you can see easily (like on the steering wheel), and most importantly of all it isn't dependent on context. In my car I can easily turn on the aircon, or change the mus…

> For things that you do regularly the button should be optimized to not be in the middle of a cluster

I found that I was using the wheel warmer button way more than I through I would. It's located right in middle of a cluster on the central console, in an awkward place to look at (right next to my hips in a blind spot).

I devised a nice and cheap fix for this UI problem that wouldn't be applicable on a touch screen: I put a googly eye sticker on it.

Better tactile feedback, no loss of function, and more whimsy in my otherwise boring car.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#488

Post by gambiting »

And yet VW is going balls to the wall and just announced that the ID.7 will feature even more touchscreen integration, with removal of all physical shortcut buttons. They are literally insane. I know someone who is getting rid of their brand new MK8 golf over this, the controls are downright unusable. Every review of id3/4/5 mentions this as a major negative, yet VW just sticks their fingers in their ears and goes "lalalalalalalala can't hear you".

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#489

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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."

> making them significantly less expensive than tactile controls

And a single point of failure.

Re: Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens

#490

Post by Lio »

onion2k wrote: post #429
stonogo wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beat Doom on a TI-84. I'm not sure I buy this.

Doom does very little work to draw each frame. It does a handful of small calculations to update the game state, and then traverses a BSP tree and draws some vertical blocks for walls followed by a flood fill for the floor and ceiling (although I suspect that was missing on the TI-84 ports because filling is slow). Calculating and drawing a complex graph often requires far more operations.

That's what's wonderful about Doom. The simplicity of what it does belies the effort put into achieving that on limited hardware.

When it come out it was mind blowing and I think it's a testament to what can be done when people actually care about the product.

I suspect the issue with software for consumer goods in general is a stake holder/project management one and not software engineering.

If the stake holder cares more about a tick list of features than how well the features work there's not much the engineer can do. In my experience stake holders are often much more interested in their burn down graphs and Gantt charts than in getting a really polished core which could later scale quickly with just config.

You need a product owner with real vision and understanding of what good looks like. It's almost a cliche now to reference Steve Jobs but he really did get that a few really excellent features are better than a laundry list of stuff that sucks.

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