91–100 of 218 posts
I'll offer a contrary perspective that I haven't yet read here: Digital controls have the potential to be more accessible to people who can't turn a knob due to a mobility impairment. Edit: See also ndarilek's explanation of how his mobility-impaired girlfriend benefits from Alexa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344613
You don't make a UI worse (more dangerous) for 99.99999% of drivers in order to accommodate the .00001%. The radio isn't a necessity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably your car will be in places with more demanding climate conditions than your knob-filled synth. And areas of high humidity or with lots of dust/gunk are the places that break down knobs the most. But I agree that I think it's probably largely a UX/aesthetics choice. Low cost touch screens are usually pretty terrible at handling varying climate conditions, especially compared to some decent knobs/encoders. I…
>Presumably your car will be in places with more demanding climate conditions than your knob-filled synth. And areas of high humidity or with lots of dust/gunk are the places that break down knobs the most. Yeah, you wish. Have you ever been to a music studio, or a live show? You'd be lucky if nobody spills beer on your gear :) Dust, gunk, smoke, humidity, and temperature are usually way worse than in the interior of…
Haha touche. You're right, the amount of alcohol I've seen in my friends' synths when performing is uh not the way I treat my keyboards or synths that stay home lol.
> The fear comes from the need to sell "modern"-looking interfaces. If the new car looks like the old one, why buy it?
Agreed. I hope they snap out of their collective delusion sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I wonder if you can make your own knobby panel that interfaces with Android Auto to paper over the crappy UX of flat surfaces.
Seriously. Without a dedicated on/off/volume knob for the soundsystem, the driving experience is diminished drastically, no matter how nice the car. And of course touch is way better than eyesight when you are supposed to be paying attention to the road. As someone else said, rough motor skills are safer and more appropriate in a car then controls needing fine motor skills.
Digital vehicle temperature control is just infuriating. There are only two settings: blast the driver with freezing air until the rest of the car cools down, or roast the driver alive until the rest of the car warms up.
Not a car, but my main gigging keyboard for as long as I've been gigging has been the Korg SV-1, and a big part of the reason is that there's no screens, only knobs. It's a pretty great interface, all in all. 90% of the time I use the presets I made for myself the first week I got it, but whenever I need something else I have no trouble doing it within seconds. It's fairly limited, in terms of features and sound bank…
I have a speaker bar and the touch volume controls drive me crazy to the point that I've decided I will never again buy a soundsystem without proper buttons or knobs for volume.
> So what do product designers have against knobs? Several things. ... Then the piece omits the two overwhelmingly important reasons: cost and reliability. Knobs definitely are much better to use, but things with moving parts that stick out from the surface are not as reliable in population terms. Most people never have trouble, but that quintile that gives their stuff a hard time costs manufacturers a lot.
There is a shitton of very crappy rotary encoders out there that attest to that. For example, most microwaves I've seen that use knobs tend to wear them down pretty fast. Mine has a pretty much analog timer and just cannot be set for anything less than 1 min since it will randomly stop somewhere in the 0-60s interval due to wear. A relative's oven has a digital relative rotary encoder, but again due to wear it tends…
There are no visible left/right click buttons on modern laptop touchpads. You get a sleek looking touchpad. Tap bottom left side harder to left click, right side to right click. There are still buttons beneath, but no, to designers eye they are somehow uglier than a flat broad spread out touchpad.
It reminds of the Norman Doors ("Design of Everything"). Designers made the doors in a mall so sleek and plain and 'beautiful', there were no handles or boundaries between doors. And people would get stuck trying to push the wrong side. So much for 'beautiful' design.