Which can make their results absolute garbage.

Like data driven can tell you a button is "not used often" it can't tell you that a button is "essential to be fast available in some safety critical situations". (Or for other examples, that a feature is not unused because people don't want it but because it's hidden or bad designed.)

But somehow I still meat people which believe that poorly data driven approaches will yield the best results, which as far as I can tell is complete unrealistic. (Which doesn't mean in any way you shouldn't also use data for decisions, just be aware that data just shows a part of an picture and can often be very misleading.)

Myself and quite few others who come by themselves to the gym more infrequently andwere using the machines (you need a spotter for the same exercises on the free weights). Now both groups paid the same for membership, but they essentially removed the ability for one group to train, needless to say I moved to a different gym. By blindly following the data they optised for worse customers (you want people to subscribe but not show up often).

There are other considerations. If it costs a lot more to have someone using the machines than to have someone using the free weights, you might be better off with just the free-weight crowd than you are also having the intermittent machine guys. You want customers that are profitable, which isn't the same thing as customers that only rarely show up.

If it's really what happened I'd see that as a pretty great move.

At same spaces, yes! Good quality barbells and weights, while expensive, keep for over 30 years. Bodybuilding and powerlifting doesn't take much space, so you don't need a large space, and the customer base is dedicated and can often tolerate their gyms being a bit out of the way. Machines, however, like to break and are incredibly expensive compared to barbells and weights.

When people want to join a gym they ask the fit guy which gym they recommend. It's a bit like techies recommending thinkpads or macbooks which gave those respective products massive boosts.

As a non-English computer user, I'm increasingly annoyed by Crowdin-style jumblations. Missed context is the common trope for both - whether the less-used feature do mean the feature is less important, or whether the "Play" on a button do mean "I instruct you _Play_ this media" or "I want to _Play_ this game" depends on the context(the language I mainly use do use separate words for the latter two).

Pretty much the problem in a nutshell.

App/icon X may be the most COMMONLY used one.

But it doesn't necessarily make it the most IMPORTANT one, the one I need to reach in a hurry / most easily.

I don't know how to capture, via automated telemetry, "this occasional button I REALLY REALLY need"... so it's just hubris then.

I'm an outsider, I've only entered Tesla's as opposed to driven them, but the UX is such a massive deal-breaker for this old grouch, it's unbelievable. I wish it weren't so but c'est la vie.

So now I have to type “news.” before it will fill news.ycombinator.com, because it started showing me the wrong option and I kept inadvertently picking it because it used to give me the right one.

There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism for it to realize “every time this happens he closes that website immediately and goes to a different one that we ranked #2 in the autocomplete search.” So until I retrain my muscle memory I’ll just keep on mistraining the autocomplete even further.

This is a disheartening yet frighteningly common problem with UI automation. It doesn't learn enough to actually be aware of the expected result, yet it can't be programmed to behave exactly as you want or need.

Automation in user interfaces should be exactly the opposite. It should try to learn your repeated actions so that you can perform them automatically, yet if the learning goes wrong, the user should be in control at all times and override the automatic deduced actions.

I use them at least a few times a year, though far less than I used to when I was on the interstate a lot more. Any time traffic rapidly drops more than about 20mph, I light up my hazards to let following traffic know, "Yes, you see brake lights, no, they're not just people scrubbing a few miles an hour off - get on your brakes now!" Probably a habit I picked up from truckers, a lot of them do this for the very understandable reason that a big rig doesn't stop on a dime, and even if they will, you're likely to unstack your cargo in the process.

Super infrequently used compared to other buttons, but also not something I really have the time go sorting through menus for when I need it. And neither do I trust the car's automatic systems to turn them on for me.

Though, if I could dream, we'd use LED brake lights to encode braking intensity somehow. The car knows if I'm barely touching the pedal to cancel cruise control and light up the brakes, or if I've just mashed them to the ABS actuation point, but the brake lights don't encode any of this useful info. You couldn't rely on it for car behavior (trivial to spoof, and get rid of tailgaters), but it would be an additional useful input for driving - "Woah, hey, that car in front of you just nearly locked up their wheels, radar data agrees, slow down!"

I suppose regulations do not allow it in the U.S. but at least here it can be programmed on/off via service terminals.

Random example from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJk-rJpgF1o&t=108s

Maybe the concern is that in heavy traffic a sea of flashing lights will overwhelm / distract people too much? Or cause seizures? I'm really not sure.

I don't know the legality of them, but nobody ever complained on the motorcycles.

Most German cars will flash the brake lights when you push the brakes hard, and they will also automatically turn on hazard lights if you brake hard to a (near) full stop (assuming you were going some minimum speed of 50 or 70 km/h).

ABS stepping in is not a requirement as far as I could tell (had this a few times when erring on the side of caution when the light turned yellow). Not requiring ABS makes sense because even if you’re driving on proper roads and your recent German car has great tires and brakes and doesn’t need ABS to decelerate quickly, the truck behind you probably still needs a bit more time and early warning to avoid a collision.

For the type of situation that you mentioned, it’s common to design counter metrics or context dependent metrics. Define the “really important” situation, see how often people can use the necessary button in that time. Define your goals based on that ratio and you are on the right track.

The thing is, interfaces are limited. I think there’s a reasonable discussion around how important different features are, especially when they are rarely used in general.

Again, I’m not too familiar with Tesla, and it sounds like they made choices different than you think they should. But it’s not the approach that is the problem - setting bad goals or bad strategies is at issue.

I suppose a way is to correlate use of the button with activity that may indicate an emergency situation. For example strong accelerations, quick movement, etc... Some touchscreen can also sense how strong the push is, and we have a tendency to push harder on important buttons.

This is stupid. It's a car and you need controls accessible in an instant, not hidden behind a login page and captcha.

Rarely used buttons may be hard to find and yet very important in specific situations. If car companies really want to use some form of AI in the UI, that's going to be bad in almost all cases, except if they use it to help you find that important but rarely used buttons in those rare situations where you need it.

Of course it should also still be immediately accessible in its normal spot.

There's a reason things like planes and industrial equipment don't have dynamic interfaces.

Touchscreens for any functions related to operating the vehicle should be regulated out of existence IMO. It’s a car not a phone.

The optimisation function should be how much you can do without needing to look away from the road.

You're assuming Tesla's end goal is to make the car more usable, and not to maximize revenue.

Their goal is to be transportation smart TV. Sell apps, media, advertising, etc. That's why so much money is being poured into self-driving cars. Americans in particular spend a massive amount of time staring at pavement, and that represents a huge untapped market.

Self-driving cars aren't about the betterment of humanity; the deaths and injuries are certainly horrific in scale, but self-driving cars don't solve the primary problem: our heavy use of low occupancy vehicle trips is not sustainable environmentally, energy-wise, land-use wise (roads or parking), logistically, economically (6+ year car loans, crumbling infrastructure because we can't afford to keep it all in good repair, etc)

(If you think this sounds like an exaggeration, just look at how technology is currently being used for government control around the world, and consider how self driving cars will be different).

That's because a physical hazard light switch is required by law.

Compared this to Hyundai cars, who I don't think gets enough credit for their ergonomics.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/2022-...

https://www.genesis.com/content/dam/genesis-p2/kr/assets/mod...

If it's actually on the ceiling, I either know it's there, or I'll be into pulsing my brakes manually before I bother to find it should I actually need it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIBMxGdbjfo

On every other car I've been in, any switches in that location I would naturally assume are for controlling the lights right next to it, but evidently no one in Tesla's design chain thought of that...

But model 3 takes the cake.

The trim of the dash in the picture, as much as luxurious it may be, reminded me of driving a desk, a walnut or ?mango wood desk... sitting in a comfy four-wheeled office chair. Also notable so many buttons on the driver side door, not sure for what purpose.

Mercedes did eventually fix the issue in the most recent model w223 https://car-images.bauersecure.com/pagefiles/96149/mercedes_...

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZWS4sYKT0hU/maxresdefault.jpg

He might have intuition in this area, but one individual's intuition is a poor substitute for actual data.

If there is one thing that I hear way too much out of intelligent, moneyed minds, is that people need to be controlled.

I'm a big Model 3 fan but I hate the new UI. At least let us use the new docking areas for every possible function.

Up till now the windshield wiper control was the biggest model 3 UX issue. When I took delivery of my model 3 it started raining and I almost had an accident trying to figure out how to get the wipers working. The auto-wiper function sucks big time. But now there's more fairly important functions that are really hard to get to, from annoying (driver profiles) to safety (defog).

This is really hard to understand and concerning.

That got me laughing. :) I would be _convinced_ it's a joke and my friends are behind this and want to give me a treat in already sucking Covid-times..

This is also how we ended up with the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office 2007 and beyond, then later other places within Windows (Explorer, Paint, etc). Microsoft essentially collected click statistics across various UIs and used those for decision making to choose which buttons would be big and which would be buried under small icons or sub-menus.

I'm used to it now, but it was jarring and took a while.

If ever there was a case of “you break it, you bought it”.