Tesla does not skew 60+ anywhere in the company, and they introduced these oversized screen based displays years ago.
So on you four bullets above:
1) True 2) I don't know, perhaps? 3) Maybe a quick 'image' audience, but are they doing usability testing? 4) Completely false.
The big weight is on point #1, for two reasons.
1) Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using. Then go and see what those physical buttons cost. They are not cheap. And there are a lot of them. And both technologies have micro processors behind them, so using physical knobs and buttons doesn't save money there.
2) Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints. Designers love it.
One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, and now I'll be stuck staring at an illuminated display that I hate using in any case.
You know they're not. If they were, nobody would ever replace a knob with a touchscreen.
I suspect that the engineers fighting them is really just a case of the hardware team and the software team not understanding the world the other lives in. The hardware team is working with a slow as molasses processor that is the only thing thats been approved for the ridiculously rugged life that a car CPU lives and the software people don't understand that just because a webkit rendering engine is completely fluid on their 6 month old Precision workstation it won't be on a 500mhz in dash processor.
* The one and only physical button car took 10 seconds total to complete their tasks
* Two touch-screen cars (Volvo C40 and Dacia Sandero) took only 13 seconds to complete the tasks
* Most touch-screen cars take 20-40 seconds
These results are certainly consistent with the hypothesis, "A moderately well-designed physical interface is likely to be better than an extremely well-designed touch-screen interface". But it's not really enough data to support the hypothesis that all physical interfaces are better than all touch-screen interfaces. You'd want to see what the curve looks like -- with it so close, it's quite possible that some, or even many, physical interfaces would take longer than 13 seconds for their benchmark.
And if you slow people down by 30% but reduce costs by a significant fraction, I think that's probably worth it.
Another of the many reasons to decry the death os Saab as a car company.
Later edit: Added link to YT video demonstrating Saab's night mode [1]
It all makes sense from just the financial point of view. So that means it isn't going away any time soon, unless there's a huge backlash from consumers.
Perhaps the best thing we can hope for is 1 car manufacturer deciding: "Buttons first, touch screen(s) second."
Let consumers decide with their wallets. Though, I wouldn't be surprised that many consumers go for an inferior product just because it looks cool. Because that, unfortunately, is how humans work.
This makes a ton of sense for displaying state.
For manipulating state I need tactile physical controls.
This is how computers work, and for good reason. I have a big screen to show state, and keyboard + mouse to manipulate it.
Doesn't stop Toyota for wanting a solid $1000 to replace the display in my 2014 Corolla. Someone's pocketing a lot of money.
The whole marketing is built on it, you get a small screen and lots of buttons if you get the basic version of the car and you get giant touchscreen if you buy the premium package.
If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy(at the time of purchase, most people don't have real world experience with touch screens on cars and touch screens are in these cutting edge electronics that are expensive, so they must be good). If your new car has a small screen you need to explain why this was the logical choice and how much you saved.
It's even the same with the iPhone 13 mini. That device is amazing, you can use it with one hand and fits in every pocket and the screen is actually larger than the first large screen iPhone(the iPhone 6) but people will try to understand why you bought that one. Are you poor? Why would you buy a tiny phone?
It's very strange, the word on the street is that the larger the screen the better. If your $30K product instantly becomes much easier to sell when you replace buttons with touchscreens without increasing the costs wouldn't you do that? I guess you need to have a niche, snobby traditionalist brand to be able to reject that demand from the consumers.
I mean, fsck them. If I had people in my life who though like that (I don't), I'd get rid of them. If they're family and cannot be simply cut off, I'd minimise the contact.
I much prefer to just stick to like-minded people and not try to be friends with people where our fundamentals are completely at odds.
Relative to other iPhones, yes. I read that it accounts for 3% of iphone 13 (Pro, Pro Max, mini, standard) sales. The 13 line itself accounts for about 75% of sales. If Apple sold 40M phones per quarter, that 120M of the 13 line, so 3.6M of the 13 Mini. At 699, that's a 2.5BN business. Not too shabby.
You really don't, and the fact that people consider it a given that you do says some very bad things about society. You should be buying the things that work the best for _you_, not the ones that will impress your friends.
Does this ever happen? I've never heard anyone express jealousy regarding not having a big enough touchscreen in their car. I've heard several owners of modern cars with touchscreens bemoan how complicated and slow to use they are. In my experience literally no-one who actually buys and drives cars thinks they are a good idea and many people - including myself - are deterred from buying a new model specifically because of the technology.
The thing is, it's actually really hard to judge quality of a design(takes a bachelor degree in Industrial Design and masters in related field and a few studies like the one in question to objectively evaluate a design). Most people like the new trendy one and unfortunately in cars that's a large touchscreen.
Don't think of car enthusiast, think people who like the car because of the shade of its color and feel of the leather - which is most people.
Horse hockey. Spend a couple years in Quality Assurance with your eyes open. It:s trivial to seperate wheat from chaff. The key that your Industrial Design might give you insight on is the fact that Industry has decided unilaterally that cost to produce > joy of end user in use. I.e. if it's cheaper to make and sell, it's higher Quality, rather than it's damn good, now lets streamline it.
Yes, your process weighs into it, but I assure you, the cognitive load of a haptic interface vs a touchscreen is so much lower it's absurd to even try to compare. If you really care about the end user, you take the time to get them buttons, and don't distract them with touchscreen finicky BS.
Those are exactly the people I'm talking about though. I'm in the UK - maybe the current culture is different here to some other places?
Of course it's also possible that my own experience hasn't been representative but I've heard the same story so many times for so long now that it's hard to believe I've encountered some freak sample of outliers.
Also, chalk me up as someone who has never heard a positive thing about car touch screens after a week or so of interaction.
Precisely. Millions of people (intelligent, rational, highly-educated) still buy cars with specific color/trim as their primary motivator. Until the trend reverses, a screen will continue to be a value-add to any vehicle because of the "modern" association.
Honda has features they implemented in some attempt to streamline the experience but you still get lost easily.
After having a few vehicles with large touchscreens and then buying an F-150 XL to simplify, I can't even describe the elated feeling of operating a vehicle where the screen does what it's supposed to do with the vital controls all being physical. Yeah, I look like peasant but I get to keep my sanity.
Back in the day, you could easily tell the difference between an expensive high-quality amplifier and a molded piece-of-plastic mass-produced boombox.
Car companies are already kind of doing this, usually just a button or two on the steering wheel. But IMO the entire dash should be a bunch of blank configurable buttons.
Actually, Porsche Taycan apparently has an amazing knob. MKBHD was very impressed by it[0].
But maybe the jealousy is a too strong of a word.
The irony is of course that the decision to have very few buttons (not one, not zero, but very few) with almost all input via the screen was made very carefully by Apple with very specific justification based on understanding of how phones were used and could be used. This is clear from Jobs' iphone keynote.
If Steve Jobs, Jony Ives etc were redesigning car interfaces it's far from obvious that they would have made similar decisions.
Mazda also has this beautiful dial-joystick which we can operate in a rested position. It is so intuitive that I stopped using the touchscreen console itself. On the other hand even when we operate using a dial and buttons we take our eyes for an instant to look at the screen to check the changes. Now imagine looking away at a touchscreen just to see what operation to perform etc. This is a major distraction.
It's mostly a cost saving measure.
Physical buttons are expensive. I you eliminate them, the car gets cheaper to make.
That's all.
It's a sign of low quality and I expect that in 5 to 10 years, consumers will start to realise this.
Years ago when I was working in IT at FoMoCo I recall seeing a piece of paper on an office bulletin board outlining how they had managed to save like $40 on the production cost of a Taurus, a vehicle that at the time was about $20,000. Those savings were the result of multiple sub-$1 to several dollar cost savings tweaks made between production years.
Ford has built something like 8 million Tauri, save a few dollars on each of them and it adds up to real money, like enough to redecorate the executive cafeteria.
There are also reliability expectations. If I need defrost because the windshield just fogged over, it better activate when I turn that knob on my sixteen year old car. And so far, it always has.
My favourite feature of touchscreens in cars is when you try to click a button but go over a bump[1] so your finger misses and you press something else. Genius.
I do get that touchscreens allow manufactures to add and remove controls though.
Rolling out UI changes for self-driving cars, like getting rid of the, knob behind the wheel, will help with safety no end.
1. Not sure what the bump was, probably the neighbour's kid or dog or something. Too busy trying to get the latest Smartless. That Will Arnet, what a card, etc, etc...
Gluing a single tablet is much faster.
I'm not so hopeful. The same can be said about household appliances. Yet more and more random things figure they should have touchscreens, or at the very least touch buttons. And this trend has lasted for far more than 10 years.
Consumers is the key word here. Manufacturers already know that buttons have the "disadvantage" that they break independently. They are also easier to fix with a generic replacement part. Which means that you won't have to scrap your car because it suddenly became unusable.
Force manufacturers to provide replacement parts for 25 years after original purchase, and see them flocking back to the basics. But that prob. won't happen in EU (because it's against the interests of Germany) or USA (because "communism"). So I guess we're depending on the common sense of Japanese and Korean manufacturers?
Is there evidence it was 60+ year-olds who decided to lean on touchscreens for cars?
If that's just an assumption, isn't an equally likely ageist guess that it was pushed by people who came up through the ranks in the era of "UX"? (Since I'd expect that old-school, pre-UX human factors engineers, who grew up on research coming from aircraft cockpit optimization, safety, and UI in service of the user... would research the heck out of a new technology option like this.)
Sort of related, I have the exact same issue with portable music players while walking or cycling. Most of the time the only task I need to do is play/pause or forward/backward track.
For a player with buttons it takes a small amount of attempts and after that you've learned the position of the buttons by heart and can control the device even while it's in your pocket, without needing to see it. Usually aided by some tactile feedback. Fast, convenient, and somewhat safer since we're talking traffic situations.
With a touchscreen-only player that is much harder, sometimes impossible (depending on which screen you're in the controls might not be in the same place or not be there at all).
Sad thing is, this was already the case like a decade ago, leaving me wondering if designers have any pride in their UX, simply don't know they're doing it wrong, willingly just focus on other things apart from usability, etc. In any case: driving a heavy vehicle at high speeds should be the last case where simple things like switching a radio station actually requires you to take your eyes of the road. That's just insane.
There is so much opportunity for better regulation, without making more numerous regulations.
I already have a screen showing what radio station is playing, and one on the dash telling me where to go. If a screen is required for a backup camera, just combine it. If I'm reversing I probably don't need the satnav anyway, whereas if I'm reversing or using satnav I probably do need other functions which just means you need an even bigger screen so you can fit everything on.
But that's ok with touchscreens.
Do you have any evidence for this? Seems pretty outlandish to me.
> 1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want.
What does 4 even mean? If we took 1-3 as fact, then should businesses have disregarded them and instead made something more expensive to produce that looked cheaper and sold for less because people don't respond so positively?
Please don’t play this game where a bad design decision was finally recognized as bad design and a scapegoat is found rather than admitting the “experts” who did it have no clothes.
UX branding itself “UX” rather than any of the half dozen other names we used to use was a clear statement of “It will be different this time, I promise.” It wasn’t. The design trends we got were different, but bad interaction design is still bad interaction design.
I barely use the touchscreen and when not needed I outright turn it off. This is quite easy because BMW has 8 buttons that can be mapped to any function in the touchscreen including turning off the main screen.
Another thing I enjoy is the gesture detector. It sometimes has false positives when I gesticulate a lot but it works when I actually intend it to. It is very satisfying to mute the radio or change an annoying music with a hand gesture. If they would keep trying to integrate and perfect it I think it would be the right direction for innovation.
Touchscreens are fine when parked or for the passenger. Anything else they are useless and often have too much distracting info, so they are turned off.
Was looking at [1] and even with the joystick it is less than ideal. I would need to try though. The joystick is good to navigate the screen but navigating a screen while driving is still not the way it should be.
No doubt it'll get to the point where you can't update it any more - either due to hardware incompatibility, lack of processing power, or some new technology being added. But it has meant that a 2013 Model S looks more modern today than it would have otherwise.
Equally, tech tends to look dated much faster than physical buttons do. It's too early to really say which has more long-lasting appeal.
"UI revision 1.23: move the Passenger Seat Blender switch further away from the air conditioning controls"
A car is a dependable tool. Changing the UI during a car's lifetime is dangerous and unprofessional. I'd say the same is true for smartphones and computers but I guess the majority of people think of them as simple "cool entertainment devices"
this is a unproductive conservative attitude
no I won’t get off your lawn
I’ve been burned by changing UIs but it’s the price we pay for progress
tell me more about how updating your car's UI overnight can make you more productive
all updates taking together will allow for progress
This is a bug, not a feature.
If I'm driving then I'm driving. I want any non-driving controls to be as simple, consistent and reliable as possible. I don't want any non-essential controls at all. I don't want anything I might want to use while driving that requires me to take my eyes off the road at all. I couldn't care less what some flashy touchscreen UI looks like because I should never have to look at it.
The physical controls on the dash of every vehicle I drive regularly still work as well and feel as comfortable to use as they ever did. In some cases those vehicles are over a decade old. I'll take that over the modern touchscreen junk any day.
Sure, on a minute-to-minute timescale, anyone must obviously agree.
But over the long term of owning a car, it is an immensely valuable feature. My 2018 car still feels quite new and fresh - much less reason to replace it than if it were falling behind.
The car won't update itself, so:
1. Ignore any updates as they become available.
2. Problem solved.
There's a substantial group of people who lease cars, and just get a new car after the lease is up. For that group of people, that's probably a substantial reason along with the exterior styling.
My MB is a UX disaster.
Have a guess how many controls there are in the car for navigating the (non-touch!) screen?
1? Nope. 2? Nope. 3? Yes 3. A touch surface in the centre console, a spinning wheel in the centre console (which is also a joystick), and finally a little joystick thing on the steering wheel.
Volume controllers? 2.
And don't get me started on how dangerously absurd it is trying to switch between MB's own system and Apple Carplay/Google Auto whilst driving.
The updates are only for bug fixing.Maybe this will change with SaaS but today i never heard of any Car company which does this. And no, i don't consider Tesla a car company.
In a previous discussion someone mentioned that part of this trend toward screens in cars is that new cars are now required to have rear-view camera. So once you are required to have the screen, it's really almost nothing to waltz over to touch screens. Of note: the "winning" car is so old it doesn't have rear-view cameras.
https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/170098/bmw-idrive...
edit: Nevermind.
> The main part of the BMW iDrive system is a control wheel, which can turn clockwise and anticlockwise like a volume dial. It can also be pushed forwards, backwards and to each side as if it were a joystick, and the centre acts as a button that can be pressed to confirm a choice or select an option. As mentioned above, later versions have adopted touchscreen technology, gesture control and voice commands, so there are multiple ways to operate a newer iDrive system in addition to the rotary control.
It's a physical user interface with buttons and a joystick. Which is basically what everybody here wants.
My steering wheel has volume controls and the environmental controls are still button based.
If Toyota half-way through shipping their latest car realize it's better to have two knobs on the dashboard, they can very easily add one if the dashboard is just one big touch screen.
With touch screen and OTA updates, you can skip the hard part and leave it for future you to improve if needed. But as we all know, when it's already sold there is no motivation to spend money to improve. So touch UI stays half baked. And only gets improved with future models.
I do agree with the premise that physical buttons and knobs are generally far superior to touchscreen UI's, at least for the common core basic things.
However, I don't agree that it's about the boomers, or the capitalists, or any other Internet strawman forcing something onto the masses against its wishes. I think it REALLY IS a matter of test audiences and "casuals" having tastes that differ from power users and other people that think deeply about a thing. You see this in many different domains.
Driving a car with touch screens (new BMW or Mercedes) has left me very unimpressed. My 2016 VW Golf has actual buttons, switches, and knobs to twist and turn and press and flip.
Car reviewers, too, often say it's a shame that car manufacturers are switching to touch screen nonsense. It's such a shameful trend if you think about it. The BMW series of pre-2022 had buttons in the dashboard, but the upcoming new series will do away with those entirely.
Touch screens even find their way onto steering wheels and doors.
Of course, it's easy to understand why:
1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want.
Honestly, I hope European legislation makes it illegal at some point. For the sake of safety. With touch screens, even the most simple task requires you to take your eyes off the road in front of you; with regular buttons you could do many task just with touch.
What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance!
So, now you need to do everything with an outstretched arm in a moving vehicle to operate tiny buttons on a flat touch screen.
Oh, and the touch screen can only barely hit 60 frames per second and often feels much slower. They're even saving costs on GPU power in their fancy luxury cars.