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I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
We're revealing too much to google and God knows who else.
When I asked him why they didn't replace the existing 3 position switch (down/halfway/up) with a 3 position "go down/stay where you were/go up" and just count the revs and remember them, he looked completely blank.
The idea that the people building these UIs are actually interested in actual safe UX is misguided. UX is irrelevant, UI has to be sexy in the showroom.
Neither Apple or Google want the manufacturers to put in knobs and switches, because then they'll have to adapt their partially neutered existing iOS/Android UIs to support things like CANbus etc. Plus the integration costs will go up and nobody got time for that.
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> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).
> having a flexible interface makes a lot more sense For business , not the user. And honestly I expect the answer is simpler: this enables them to subcontract out the UI part and run it in parallel with the development of the rest of the car, because the UI can no longer affect anything else in the car design.
Is that a genuine benefit, or one that shows up more early in planning and who's downsides show up late?
Recently switched from a Renault Captur (with touchscreen) to an Audi A3 (without touchscreen) and the amount of focus the touchscreen requires compared to a non-touchscreen with a radial button is amazingly scary. How did anyone thought it was a good idea in the first place? Can't imagine going back to having a touchscreen now, and hope they slowly disappear from everything cars.
I'm curious, have you used Android Auto? You get in the car and it already knows where you want to go because it has access to your calendar. It has all of your contacts and your music. As a user these are the things that matter to me, not a car company trying to serve me a "branded interface."
But it does not. None of my trips are in calendar. None of my music is in Google Play or any stock music player. And the last thing I need in my car is phone interface.
Praise to Mazda for making this decision. As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars. For years I have been working on product interfaces (not just apps). Many studies I conducted actually told me that people favored analog controls over digital touch screens controls. It gives you tactile feedback, making it accessible for anyone with sense of touch. >…
> As a User Experience Professional, I was never able to grasp the true user's need for touch screens in cars The flexibility to benefit from rapid product iteration. If you think of cars as mostly software products that receive updates over the air, a flexible interface makes a lot more sense (even though I agree that it makes for a pretty bad user interface).
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The proper way to do this is by voice input.
Voice input in cars is the worst idea I've ever seen. I've had a brand new Mercedes with the MBUX interface and extensively used Android Auto, and the voice commands just don't work. Half the time I'm sitting there repeating myself like an absolute idiot because the car completely misunderstood what I mean(yes car, "Navigate to Cramlington" totally means "Navigate to Boston, US"). I have so many horror stories of and…
Maybe voice commands are just not ready for polish (guessing Szczepańska is polish) but seems to work fine for at least english and spanish.
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Touchscreens became fashionable due to the iPhone and iPad hype. Welcome to IT, have a look at the upcoming fashions in the summer catalog.
Once something has been sold to nearly half the population of the planet for a decade or more, you can't sensibly call it a "fashion". Apple were the first people to deploy high quality capacitive multi touch screens to the general public, with a gesture UI underneath for things like pinch zoom. This was an amazing improvement over previous handheld systems.
IT fashions usually work that way - there is an actually useful killer application and suddenly the technologies used by the killer application must be applied to everything. Peer to peer (Napster), Ruby / "static typing sucks, testing is better" (Ruby on Rails), touchscreens (iPhone), JavaScript (one language for client and server), blockchain (bitcoin / getting rich through speculation), deep learning (great solution to SOME problems) - it's a fairly simple pattern.
Also, the car industry has looong product cycles, so what you see now is what was hot 5-ish years ago.
Also, to reduce distraction I suggest using Siri with CarPlay. It works like a charm and you don't even need to look to the screen.