> Car enthusiasts were not smitten with iDrive; many found that the system had the opposite of its intended effect, requiring more, not less, visual attention. Automobile Week wrote that iDrive ''turned the 'experience' of driving the car into a computerized affair.'' And even experts who sympathize with the impulse behind iDrive note its shortcomings. ''I spent an hour experimenting in a simulator, and I got lost in the menus,'' says Don Norman, the author of ''The Design of Everyday Things.'' BMW countered by including a cheat sheet that can be affixed to the steering wheel for befuddled parking valets. Eventually, some initially skeptical reviewers have conceded that once accustomed to it, they find the iDrive indispensable; however, that acclimation has taken as long as three months.
Norman wrote more about it at https://jnd.org/design-as-communication/ .
> By logic, the iDrive was a superior device. Alas, people function through stories, not logic. Moreover, people are spatial, we remember where things are in space, whereas the iDrive destroyed spatiality. And finally, the stories we remember and the conceptual models we prefer have to do with how a particular device functions: heating and cooling the automobile, changing the station of the radio, checking what distance remains for our trip. Each activity requires a separate story, separate control, and a separate location for operation. Alas, the iDrive collapsed everything into one location.
However I doubt Google has done the work in the interim to keep the UX in Android Auto working well with dial controls. Esp if only Mazda is doing this.
Unfortunately BMW moved to eliminating a lot of hardware buttons in the latest version of the iDrive with a giant curved screen. They still have dial and buttons on the center console, plus few additional buttons under the main screen. But they have removed one of another great features - eight programmable buttons in the center. These are great and you can assign any function from the touch screen to them.
One of my favorite feature on Mazdas... never seen anything like it before