8 ms·
The thing designers are failing to understand this decade is that touch interfaces suck. Always. They are a compromise, not a feature. This includes touch scree
by coldpie 10y ago
The thing designers are failing to understand this decade is that touch interfaces suck. Always. They are a compromise, not a feature. This includes touch screens and capacitive buttons, both in vogue for the past decade.
Touch interfaces suck: they are too easy to press accidentally, and too difficult to press on purpose. In college, I actually taped pieces of paper onto my friend's TV with capacitive buttons so we could tell where the fucking buttons were in the dark. If you were off by a half centimeter, you'd turn the TV off instead of changing the volume. I regularly turn on my game consoles by lightly brushing my arm against them because of their awful capacitive buttons. Dumb, dumb dumb.
Touch interfaces provide no benefit over physical buttons except in cases where you cannot have physical buttons. Phones are a good example: physical buttons add too much bulk to the phone or drastically reduce your screen size. You also don't have a defined set of functionality. A touch interface makes sense here.
But on a laptop keyboard? You've already got a ton of keys there! Just add ten more! Instead, they've added the suckiness of a touch interface for no reason, since there was no compromise to make.
Touch interfaces aren't modern, they aren't stylish, and nobody likes them. You use them when you must make a compromise for form factor. Otherwise, stick with physical buttons.
- christophilus 10y agoThis is even more true in cars, where a touch interface is arguably dangerous. Give me buttons, and I can fiddle while keeping my eyes on the road. Give me a touch screen with heirarchical menus, and I've got to look away from the road in order to do anything at all.
- base698 10y agoSeriously. My guess as to the reason Tesla did this was to skimp on manufacturing costs. Now that they are established I wish they'd remove that screen or reduce its size.
- jp555 10y agoI hope they move it to a full windscreen HUD and add dashboard hardware controls.
- andai 10y agoWow, that sounds neat
- greglindahl 10y agoTesla has buttons for all of the most-used stuff on the steering wheel, plus voice controls. The big screen is great for maps.
- babuskov 10y agoYes! I have a touch-only radio in my car. It's a security hazard. I often have to slow down just to change the radio station, change the mp3 file that's playing or adjust the volume. It's a disaster.
- nhumrich 10y agoYep. I have a Mazda and it has a control nob for the screen that sits down by the gear nob (what is that thing called?) And it's awesome. I also.ost bought a different car, but it had touch only and I realized touch is impossible to use while driving.
- beepboopbeep 10y agoThank you! I should not be looking at screens, I should be able to run my fingers over a physical setup and understand exactly where I am. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
- Mendenhall 10y agoThis is so true in my experience with at least 4 different cars with touch screen in the last year. I snicker to myself when they talk about self driving cars because here I am thinking they cant even get a touchscreen right. I do have touchscreen on a tablet that I think works at B grade overall. In drawing programs nothing beats being able to scale and rotate the "paper" with 2 fingers. I hope while I am still alive they can perfect just that :)
- coldpie 10y agoA few years ago, I was in the Subaru dealership ready to plunk down a deposit for a brand new 2015 MY Impreza. Then we sat in the cabin and I saw the touch screen. It had a loading bar when the car turned on. Mandatory in all 2015 MY cars. I left and bought a 2011 Mazda3. Oh well.
- zimpenfish 10y ago> Touch interfaces provide no benefit over physical buttons Unless you have something like arthritis. Mind you, every other accessibility issue I thought of favoured physical buttons to some extent (eyesight, motor control, etc.)
- UnoriginalGuy 10y agoTouch isn't a magic bullet for arthritis. In the middle to later stages your accuracy goes goes, and touch buttons are often smaller and tighter together than physical buttons. That's why some people who suffer from arthritis have to use a large stylus instead of their hands.
- zimpenfish 10y agoAh, thanks for that information.
- baq 10y ago> Touch interfaces suck: they are too easy to press accidentally, and too difficult to press on purpose. this a thousand times. also, blue/white leds should die a fiery death. i've taped mine.
- harryf 10y agoIt's worse than that even. According to https://developer.apple.com/macos/touch-bar/ https://developer.apple.com/macos/touch-bar/ > "The all-new Touch Bar revolutionizes the keyboard experience by bringing dynamic controls to your fingertips. This Multi-Touch Retina display at the top of the new MacBook Pro keyboard changes depending on what the user does in your app, so you can surface context-specific features and controls." ...except anyone who can type will almost _never_ look at their fingers when typing. And what type of people can type? People that own laptops with names ending in "Pro". Touchbar doesn't make sense from any perspective Disclaimer: I have a Macbook Pro with Touchbar. Right now it's connected to a monitor and I'm using an external keyboard...
- rayiner 10y agoYou're missing an important step in that chain of logical reasoning. What percentage of people who touch type also touch type the function keys? I can use Emacs pretty well in the terminal, but I don't think I could name the function keys even for Safari.
- minitech 10y agoI use the function keys for operations available anywhere (backlight brightness, keyboard brightness, media control). (Isn’t that the default on macOS?)
- criddell 10y agoI'm on a Windows machine, so maybe it's different, but I definitely touch type on the function keys. The ones I use daily are F1 for help, F2 for next bookmark, F3 for search, F5 for run, etc... Volume up and down are Fn+F10 and Fn+F11. Browser if Fn-F1, email is Fn-F2, and so on. At one point Lenovo had a machine with a touch bar like Apple has now and I believe it was widely panned by users.
- jacobush 10y agoI touch typed on Fn keys back in the fullsize desktop keyboard days. IBM and Logitech. Then all keys except ASCII keys started to move around in new and unique ways on all laptops and "multimedia enabled" keyboards.
- onion2k 10y agothey are too easy to press accidentally The solution is to have user interfaces that are forgiving and don't punish the user for making a mistake.
- croon 10y ago>The solution is to have user interfaces that are forgiving and don't punish the user for making a mistake. Meaning ignoring input? Which in turn would suggest scrapping features to mitigate mistakes. Which would mean not a professional tool. I'm not arguing with your statement on its own, but I highly disagree in this context. In any professional tool I use, I want a 1:1 representation of _EVERYTHING_ I do. The thought of a tool treating me like an idiot (which I am) but correcting me (according to ITS OWN LOGIC) and not letting me learn (which I can) is making me furious to even consider.
- coldpie 10y agoNo, the solution is to JUST USE BUTTONS.
- onion2k 10y agoPeople[1] often press the wrong button even when they're physical buttons. [1] Me.
- freehunter 10y agoUgh, my car has real buttons for changing the stations on the radio, but it's a + type of button. Far too often I hit "up" to change stations up, but no, changing stations up is "right". Pushing the up button changes the genre of stations for the satellite radio. And you'd think I would get used to that, but on the steering wheel controls, the up arrow changes the station up. Buttons are better than touch, but I still have to fiddle with poorly laid-out buttons.
- Piskvorrr 10y agoA solution for an artificially invented problem. Right. ("Have forgiving interfaces" is good advice, but completely orthogonal to "don't make user input interface that sucks")
- nhumrich 10y agoVery true. I had a phone with a physical slide out keyboard up until they didn't make them anymore. Moving to a touch screen keyboard was and is still difficult, and I make typos all the time.
- ashark 10y agoI'm considering switching back to a slider phone with physical keyboard. My main hang-up is that some desktop applications now require you to have a smartphone for some or all functionality (Steam, WhatsApp and iMessage obviously). [EDIT] slack italic notation to HN italic notation
- Larrikin 10y agoI've found systems like Swype and flick to be far faster for most of the typing I do on my phone than any old style mini keyboard.
- rusk 10y agoTouch interfaces are cheaper at scale. They're more durable and cheaper to maintain. It's far easier to manufacture a slew of screens and program the controls on to a Touchscreen than manufacturing actual real hardware controls. Controls also have moving parts which can break. For years having an actual real keyboard was the killer feature of Blackberries and my beloved Palm Prē, but simple economics won out in the end. There's many good things about touchscreens in these terms, but not for user experience or even aesthetics.
- coldpie 10y agoMaking your laptops out of balsa wood is probably cheaper than metal, but it's still a terrible idea.
- rusk 10y agoThat is a facetious and unnecessary remark. I hope you enjoyed your little troll dopamine rush.
- coldpie 10y agoI don't think so. Touch interfaces are such miserable UXes that I actively refuse to buy them when they are used unnecessarily, much like I would refuse to buy a laptop made of balsa wood. I hope you enjoyed your little high-horse dopamine rush.
- compuguy 10y ago
- charlesism 10y ago> They are a compromise, not a feature Touch interface is terrible in almost every regard. One drawback you didn't mention is that normally with a touch interface hand-distance to screen-distance is a 1-to-1 ratio. If I'm using a 27" display, I don't want to be dragging my hand back and forth a couple feet either way to drag icons.
- compuguy 10y agoThat's why I think touch screens should be relegated to smaller devices (like the xps 13). I do not want to be using a touch screen to move things on a giant 27' display. I have a trackball for that.
- charlesism 10y agoSmaller than a computer monitor... but probably larger than a phone, since at small screen sizes the hit area will be so tiny it will be entirely obscured by your finger. God, I hate touch screens.
- reubenswartz 10y agoI like the notion of using that top row of keys dynamically-- 99.9% of the time, I don't use them, so why not give them something to do-- but I wish they had kept the keys and provided a way to dynamically reassign them, instead of turning it into a touch bar that you have to look at. You already have a giant trackpad for "non-button" actions...
- baldfat 10y ago> touch interfaces suck. Always Not true for everything. Phones? Touch is brilliant Tablet? Touch is amazing Working with children on large all in one's with touch designed software - Works like a charm they don't get mouse and keyboard Some touch sucks yes but not always
- freehunter 10y agoI don't think his point was "mouse and keyboard is better than touch" but rather "there has to be some mode of interaction that's better than touch". It's not a simple binary choice between M+K and touch.
- gdulli 10y agoTouch screens are good for some games and things like scrolling a page up and down, but terrible for productivity and text entry. My last phone with a physical keyboard was the last time I felt productive on a mobile device. Instead of creating anything on mobile the platform is about making people into just content consumers. Even with games, a handheld console with real buttons is superior for gaming in general but the touch screen works better for (and even enables) certain types of games. I'm not sure if training kids to stare at screens all day a year or two earlier than they otherwise could is a pro or a con.
- baldfat 10y ago> I'm not sure if training kids to stare at screens all day a year or two earlier than they otherwise could is a pro or a con. 10-15 minutes 3 times a week and a once a month assessment. :)
- mirkules 10y agoThank you! I did the exact same thing on one of my Samsung monitors with the tape. Except if I missed the power button, I'd hit the auto-adjust button by accident, which would cost me another 15-30 minutes. It's irritating. And cars... turning the heat/ac up or down is a nightmare on touchscreens. Compared with a real, tactile knob with a clear start and finish, I don't ever have to look at them to adjust the climate. Touchscreens are a cost-saving and "more functionality than there is room for"-enabling device, easy to customize and upgrade. But give me buttons any day. Ever wonder why there is a physical "silent button" on an iPhone? Because if your phone is ringing in a library, you don't want to dig through menus to turn it off. It's the quickest, no-look solution you can do without even taking your phone out of the pocket.
- framebit 10y agoTouch buttons also suck for the sight-disabled, meaning the range of fully blind up through my grandpa who's getting on in years and can't see like he used to. Physical buttons are an accessibility enabler.
- FireBeyond 10y agoFunnily, this is one of the things that makes me inclined to believe a rumor (that Apple pulled iMac and/or Mac Pro refreshes from the Touchbar MBP event at the very last minute following the strength of the Surface Studio event the day before): There was a -lot- of filler (25+ mins) before the announcement of the MBP, and a lot of it was lack lustre. Interestingly, several minutes were applauding Apple for its efforts in accessibility... ... only to immediately announce the huge accessibility problem that is the Touch Bar.