7 ms·

> Especially those working in vehicle interior design - people need to realize we drive a deadly 2-ton machine on our roads. This sounds very smart and serious

by avalys 6y ago

> Especially those working in vehicle interior design - people need to realize we drive a deadly 2-ton machine on our roads. This sounds very smart and serious, which must be why someone makes the same point in literally every discussion of a control interface for some kind of vehicle - but I challenge you to provide evidence that fixable UX problems in modern automobiles have led to an increase in accident rates. In fact, most modern vehicles use touchscreens to solve the very problem that you are supposedly concerned about. Rather than a complicated cockpit full of individual buttons and switches to control every single function, most modern cars have a few easy-to-find buttons and switches for functions you might want to access while driving (i.e. radio volume, climate temperature, fan speed), and use the touchscreen to hide all the more complicated and lesser-used settings out of the way! Do you really think that putting your grandmother into a car that resembled that F-15 cockpit would be a safer option? What happens if she forgets where the button is to, say, turn on the A/C compressor? Is she going to read every single label while cruising down the highway at 75 mph?

systemvoltage 6y ago
> hide all the more complicated and lesser-used settings out of the way! Why? Just looking at more stuff makes you nervous? Ever been to a library? Ever cooked a meal? Ever walked outside your house? The world is full of complex "UI". This is a total bullshit minimalism case designers make to satiate their own personal taste. I would like to see data that proves that "seeing" more stuff impedes the ability to operate something. Hiding stuff is detrimental, I would argue. The hierarchy of menus is equally as complicated as a dashboard of logically laid out "containers", each box decidated to a specific group of functions. It is exactly the same! Your vision system scans through the top level hierachy (Climate Control, Radio, Vehicle Settings, Navigation), then focusing in on individual controls (akin to sub-menu items). The benefits are massive - immediate control, haptics feedback, muscle memory, etc. Negatives a minor and can be addressed - cost, reliability and durability (wearing off labels for example). The problem is - if you look at ALPS catalog of encoders, they are rapidly going up in prices because automotive manufacturers are ditching them and they don't have enough volume to sustain production and keep costs down. If we had invested in this industry, we would have kept the costs down too. The sad thing is, they are discontinuining a lot of physical controls. > Do you really think that putting your grandmother into a car that resembled that F-15 cockpit would be a safer option? What happens if she forgets where the button is to, say, turn on the A/C compressor? Is she going to read every single label while cruising down the highway at 75 mph? Actually yes. Thank god we have knobs and buttons left for A/C controls. Why didn't hide that in the menus? Apart from a few cars, most cars have physical controls for climate and radio. Grandma's kitchen is probably 10x complicated than car UI. She does just fine.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > I would like to see data that proves that "seeing" more stuff impedes the ability to operate something. Edward Tufte made a career out of writing books that essentially argue this for data design: information density is good. Low information density means you're wasting people's time. Our visual systems are extremely good at creating and navigating hierarchies, at rapidly switching between levels of detail, and at actively filtering irrelevant information. You don't have to hide stuff, you just have to make the user determine it's irrelevant for the task at hand, and their brain will just filter it out. (See also: banner blindness.)
  - avalys 6y ago
    Quick, look at a picture of the F-15 cockpit, and find the switch to set the LANTIRN pod from Day mode to Night mode. Now imagine you’re in a car and you can’t take your eyes off the road for more than a few seconds. Airplanes are much easier than cars in that regard - once you’re airborne there’s not much to hit!
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      We're comparing it to cars with touchscreens, and I guarantee you that the first time I find that switch (parked in the garage), I'll remember where it is later. With a touchscreen, I'll always have to look. Also, neither a car nor a fighter jet assumes an untrained operator. We can't forget that you get a few dozen hours of practical training before you're allowed to drive unsupervised, and that's more than enough to familiarize yourself with the user interface. So the question boils down to: does the interface facilitate operating without looking at it, or not? Physical buttons do. Non-shit touchscreen UIs could, but they don't exist. Touchscreens used in practice don't.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Quick, look at a picture of the F-15 cockpit, and find the switch to set the LANTIRN pod from Day mode to Night mode. Now imagine you’re in a car and you can’t take your eyes off the road for more than a few seconds. That sounds easy: if it's your car, so you'll soon familiarize yourself with where the physical controls are, so you won't need to take your eyes of the road for more than a moment (if you need to at all). If it's not your car, a physical switch is no worse than a touchscreen. Navigating a screen forces you to take your eyes of the road for an extended period of time, since you need to use them to target your touch to the right part of the screen, even if you're already familiar with the UI. In short: for controls that may be used while driving, physical controls are at a minimum no worse than a touchscreen and typically much better. The only place where screens have an advantage is for extremely rarely used controls, like configuration settings. Even then, I'd argue that physical controls (like the F-15's castle button) are better for controlling the screen than using a touchscreen, since they allow a user to memorize key-press sequences. Touchscreens really only make sense on extremely small devices like smartphones.
Dahoon 6y ago
Excuse me if I misread your post but it sounds to me as if what you are saying is that touchscreens are safer? Tests have been made that show that even using Apple carplay with voice is worse than old buttons. It has also been shown to be worse than the drunk driving limit. Here is one: https://www.driving.co.uk/news/apple-carplay-android-auto-worse-reaction-times-cannabis-alcohol-says-study/ https://www.driving.co.uk/news/apple-carplay-android-auto-wo...
- avalys 6y ago
  The point I’m making is that touchscreens can lead to a safer _system_ because they allow you to optimize and simplify the layout of the buttons that remain after you’ve moved the infrequently-used functionality into the touchscreen.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Surely optimization in a moving vehicle would include a static interface with haptic feedback so you don’t have to navigate any “system”.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>What happens if she forgets where the button is to, say, turn on the A/C compressor? Is she going to read every single label while cruising down the highway at 75 mph? How are either of these things solved by hiding features behind touch screen menus? Have you ever seen a 75 year old use a computer? I think physical switches are more intuitive to someone that age.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  I have about 104 physical switches at my disposal that I use to type this comment.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    That is such a bad analogy. 104 buttons but it is mostly a single input. It is like saying a touchscreen is thousands of switches just because it has that many sensor points.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      > It is like saying a touchscreen is thousands of switches just because it has that many sensor points. Huh? This is such a bad counter analogy. Allow me to expand and prove my point. First, let's clarify what type of an input a keyboard switch is? It is Single Pole Single Throw or SPST. It is also momentary (meaning you have to keep the key pressed to close the circuit). 104 keys on a keyboard, each key is a momentary SPST switch representing the ASCII character set (let's simplify). On a touch screen, if it had 104 boxes, each representing a monentary SPST, then it is identical as far as the interaction is concerned. The finger went down, pressed inside a box or a key, and a character appeared on the screen. They are identical (in logical sense). The circuit element is the same, see the symbol for SPST here [1]. You're comparing 104 individual options for character input to a pixel on the touchscreen? Why? I don't follow and what point are you trying to make? The action is taken as a press of a finger in a specific area, not a single pixel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch#Contact_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch#Contact_terminology
dbcurtis 6y ago
You know what? When I was a kid growing up back in the northern reaches of fly-over land, I got to experience a vehicle UI that has never been bettered for the environment that it was designed for. It's the 1970's era Chevy Silverado. Why was it so good? That is easy: every control could be operated while wearing heavy mittens or snowmobile gloves. The lights were on big paddle switches. The climate control twist knobs had large grip regions. Let me tell you, if is early morning, the sun isn't up yet, the temp has only warmed up to -10F so far, being able to get the lights and heat on without pulling off your outermost of 3 layers of gloves was a real benefit. Contrast that to a modern F-150 with a touch screen and also climate control on a matrix of identical wee little switches with labels so small you can't read them from driving position. What rubbish. Trying to hit just one of those switches while driving a rough road without gloves on is nearly impossible. With snowmobile gloves, you might as well just mash your hand on the whole panel and hope for the best.
monadic2 6y ago
> In fact, most modern vehicles use touchscreens to solve the very problem that you are supposedly concerned about. Rather than a complicated cockpit full of individual buttons and switches to control every single function, most modern cars have a few easy-to-find buttons and switches for functions you might want to access while driving (i.e. radio volume, climate temperature, fan speed), and use the touchscreen to hide all the more complicated and lesser-used settings out of the way! How do you interact with a touchscreen responsibly while driving? You can’t.
- toomanybeersies 6y ago
  You're not supposed to. If you need to pair your phone to the car's bluetooth or adjust other settings that are hidden inside nested menus, you should pull over and sort it out.
rwc 6y ago
The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money. Ten sailors paid with their lives. https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
perl4ever 6y ago
What year was your first car? Mine was a 1992 Honda and I think the all-button UI was definitely better than the run-of-the mill today. How many people in their 70s or 80s do you know that are on the side of touchscreen controls for vehicles? People I have known in that age range like their iPads and iPhones but drive cars with buttons. The big reason for physical controls is you can find them without looking by feel and spatial location. Provided you have some experience.
lenkite 6y ago
AFAIK There is no research done for automobiles. But the US Navy is now getting rid of touchscreens since they apparently cause ships to crash into each other. (snark) https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john-s-mccain-crash-ntsb-report-touchscreen-mechanical-controls https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john... https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
Causality1 6y ago
If I have to take my eyes off the road to work my stereo that is a UX failure, full stop. I need to be able to find it without looking at it and touch it without activating it. That's all I ask.

by avalys 6y ago

systemvoltage 6y ago

> hide all the more complicated and lesser-used settings out of the way! Why? Just looking at more stuff makes you nervous? Ever been to a library? Ever cooked a meal? Ever walked outside your house? The world is full of complex "UI". This is a total bullshit minimalism case designers make to satiate their own personal taste. I would like to see data that proves that "seeing" more stuff impedes the ability to operate something. Hiding stuff is detrimental, I would argue. The hierarchy of menus is equally as complicated as a dashboard of logically laid out "containers", each box decidated to a specific group of functions. It is exactly the same! Your vision system scans through the top level hierachy (Climate Control, Radio, Vehicle Settings, Navigation), then focusing in on individual controls (akin to sub-menu items). The benefits are massive - immediate control, haptics feedback, muscle memory, etc. Negatives a minor and can be addressed - cost, reliability and durability (wearing off labels for example). The problem is - if you look at ALPS catalog of encoders, they are rapidly going up in prices because automotive manufacturers are ditching them and they don't have enough volume to sustain production and keep costs down. If we had invested in this industry, we would have kept the costs down too. The sad thing is, they are discontinuining a lot of physical controls. > Do you really think that putting your grandmother into a car that resembled that F-15 cockpit would be a safer option? What happens if she forgets where the button is to, say, turn on the A/C compressor? Is she going to read every single label while cruising down the highway at 75 mph? Actually yes. Thank god we have knobs and buttons left for A/C controls. Why didn't hide that in the menus? Apart from a few cars, most cars have physical controls for climate and radio. Grandma's kitchen is probably 10x complicated than car UI. She does just fine.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> I would like to see data that proves that "seeing" more stuff impedes the ability to operate something. Edward Tufte made a career out of writing books that essentially argue this for data design: information density is good. Low information density means you're wasting people's time. Our visual systems are extremely good at creating and navigating hierarchies, at rapidly switching between levels of detail, and at actively filtering irrelevant information. You don't have to hide stuff, you just have to make the user determine it's irrelevant for the task at hand, and their brain will just filter it out. (See also: banner blindness.)
- avalys 6y ago
  Quick, look at a picture of the F-15 cockpit, and find the switch to set the LANTIRN pod from Day mode to Night mode. Now imagine you’re in a car and you can’t take your eyes off the road for more than a few seconds. Airplanes are much easier than cars in that regard - once you’re airborne there’s not much to hit!
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    We're comparing it to cars with touchscreens, and I guarantee you that the first time I find that switch (parked in the garage), I'll remember where it is later. With a touchscreen, I'll always have to look. Also, neither a car nor a fighter jet assumes an untrained operator. We can't forget that you get a few dozen hours of practical training before you're allowed to drive unsupervised, and that's more than enough to familiarize yourself with the user interface. So the question boils down to: does the interface facilitate operating without looking at it, or not? Physical buttons do. Non-shit touchscreen UIs could, but they don't exist. Touchscreens used in practice don't.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Quick, look at a picture of the F-15 cockpit, and find the switch to set the LANTIRN pod from Day mode to Night mode. Now imagine you’re in a car and you can’t take your eyes off the road for more than a few seconds. That sounds easy: if it's your car, so you'll soon familiarize yourself with where the physical controls are, so you won't need to take your eyes of the road for more than a moment (if you need to at all). If it's not your car, a physical switch is no worse than a touchscreen. Navigating a screen forces you to take your eyes of the road for an extended period of time, since you need to use them to target your touch to the right part of the screen, even if you're already familiar with the UI. In short: for controls that may be used while driving, physical controls are at a minimum no worse than a touchscreen and typically much better. The only place where screens have an advantage is for extremely rarely used controls, like configuration settings. Even then, I'd argue that physical controls (like the F-15's castle button) are better for controlling the screen than using a touchscreen, since they allow a user to memorize key-press sequences. Touchscreens really only make sense on extremely small devices like smartphones.

Dahoon 6y ago

Excuse me if I misread your post but it sounds to me as if what you are saying is that touchscreens are safer? Tests have been made that show that even using Apple carplay with voice is worse than old buttons. It has also been shown to be worse than the drunk driving limit. Here is one: https://www.driving.co.uk/news/apple-carplay-android-auto-worse-reaction-times-cannabis-alcohol-says-study/ https://www.driving.co.uk/news/apple-carplay-android-auto-wo...

avalys 6y ago
The point I’m making is that touchscreens can lead to a safer _system_ because they allow you to optimize and simplify the layout of the buttons that remain after you’ve moved the infrequently-used functionality into the touchscreen.
- monadic2 6y ago
  Surely optimization in a moving vehicle would include a static interface with haptic feedback so you don’t have to navigate any “system”.

itsoktocry 6y ago

>What happens if she forgets where the button is to, say, turn on the A/C compressor? Is she going to read every single label while cruising down the highway at 75 mph? How are either of these things solved by hiding features behind touch screen menus? Have you ever seen a 75 year old use a computer? I think physical switches are more intuitive to someone that age.

systemvoltage 6y ago
I have about 104 physical switches at my disposal that I use to type this comment.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  That is such a bad analogy. 104 buttons but it is mostly a single input. It is like saying a touchscreen is thousands of switches just because it has that many sensor points.
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    > It is like saying a touchscreen is thousands of switches just because it has that many sensor points. Huh? This is such a bad counter analogy. Allow me to expand and prove my point. First, let's clarify what type of an input a keyboard switch is? It is Single Pole Single Throw or SPST. It is also momentary (meaning you have to keep the key pressed to close the circuit). 104 keys on a keyboard, each key is a momentary SPST switch representing the ASCII character set (let's simplify). On a touch screen, if it had 104 boxes, each representing a monentary SPST, then it is identical as far as the interaction is concerned. The finger went down, pressed inside a box or a key, and a character appeared on the screen. They are identical (in logical sense). The circuit element is the same, see the symbol for SPST here [1]. You're comparing 104 individual options for character input to a pixel on the touchscreen? Why? I don't follow and what point are you trying to make? The action is taken as a press of a finger in a specific area, not a single pixel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch#Contact_terminology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch#Contact_terminology

dbcurtis 6y ago

You know what? When I was a kid growing up back in the northern reaches of fly-over land, I got to experience a vehicle UI that has never been bettered for the environment that it was designed for. It's the 1970's era Chevy Silverado. Why was it so good? That is easy: every control could be operated while wearing heavy mittens or snowmobile gloves. The lights were on big paddle switches. The climate control twist knobs had large grip regions. Let me tell you, if is early morning, the sun isn't up yet, the temp has only warmed up to -10F so far, being able to get the lights and heat on without pulling off your outermost of 3 layers of gloves was a real benefit. Contrast that to a modern F-150 with a touch screen and also climate control on a matrix of identical wee little switches with labels so small you can't read them from driving position. What rubbish. Trying to hit just one of those switches while driving a rough road without gloves on is nearly impossible. With snowmobile gloves, you might as well just mash your hand on the whole panel and hope for the best.

monadic2 6y ago

> In fact, most modern vehicles use touchscreens to solve the very problem that you are supposedly concerned about. Rather than a complicated cockpit full of individual buttons and switches to control every single function, most modern cars have a few easy-to-find buttons and switches for functions you might want to access while driving (i.e. radio volume, climate temperature, fan speed), and use the touchscreen to hide all the more complicated and lesser-used settings out of the way! How do you interact with a touchscreen responsibly while driving? You can’t.

toomanybeersies 6y ago
You're not supposed to. If you need to pair your phone to the car's bluetooth or adjust other settings that are hidden inside nested menus, you should pull over and sort it out.

rwc 6y ago

The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money. Ten sailors paid with their lives. https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

perl4ever 6y ago

What year was your first car? Mine was a 1992 Honda and I think the all-button UI was definitely better than the run-of-the mill today. How many people in their 70s or 80s do you know that are on the side of touchscreen controls for vehicles? People I have known in that age range like their iPads and iPhones but drive cars with buttons. The big reason for physical controls is you can find them without looking by feel and spatial location. Provided you have some experience.

lenkite 6y ago

AFAIK There is no research done for automobiles. But the US Navy is now getting rid of touchscreens since they apparently cause ships to crash into each other. (snark) https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john-s-mccain-crash-ntsb-report-touchscreen-mechanical-controls https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/11/20800111/us-navy-uss-john... https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-installed-touch-screen-steering-ten-sailors-paid-with-their-lives/ https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...

Causality1 6y ago

If I have to take my eyes off the road to work my stereo that is a UX failure, full stop. I need to be able to find it without looking at it and touch it without activating it. That's all I ask.