21 ms·

Bring Back Our Knobs: Analog vs. Digital (2009)

254 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

Causality1 5y ago
Digital vehicle temperature control is just infuriating. There are only two settings: blast the driver with freezing air until the rest of the car cools down, or roast the driver alive until the rest of the car warms up.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  I personally only ever set the temperature to max hot or max cold. Then I adjust fan speed if it's too much.
- ziml77 5y ago
  I've always dealt with that by just adjusting vents. If the A/C is freezing me, I point the vents a bit over me. If I'm very hot for some reason then I'll adjust one or more of the vents to point right at me.
cmclaughlin 5y ago
Also not a car - but I recently got a gas fireplace insert that came with a remote control with a touch screen. It takes a few seconds for the remote to “boot up” every time I try to use it. Long enough for me to get frustrated and look away. But if I don’t stay focused the screen will turn off and I’ll have to start over. It’s frustrating enough that I’ve started research “dumb” remotes with real buttons
frankosaurus 5y ago
IMO, much worse than touch screen buttons is touch screen glare. Driving westward in the mornings, sunlight is reflected directly off my car's touch screen into my eyes. Everything on the dash needs to be matte -- it's a safety issue.
- jrootabega 5y ago
  I'd say anything in the car, really, but mostly the stuff in front of your eyes. My car has some chrome-like trim on the steering wheel, gear shift, etc. (It's a cheap car, so this is not just a case of it being luxury trim.) The sun occasionally hits them at the right angle to blast straight into my eyes. It's not frequent, but in the wrong circumstances it could cause an accident. Even once is unacceptable.
rpmisms 5y ago
If it's an analog system, I want analog input. If it's a digital system, I want good digital input or excellent tactile input. Stereo: well-weighted analog knobs that are responsive. Computer: mechanical keyboard. Car: Manual Transmission.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  what do you drive?
  - rpmisms 5y ago
    Sold my manual for a Tesla. I drive my wife's manual Mazda when I want to enjoy the driving experience. Tesla does have good digital inputs, but very little about the car is analog, so I think I'm being consistent.
    - hoppla 5y ago
      My next car might be a mazda because of this: https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-purging-touchscreens-from-its-vehicles https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... TLDR; They are removing touchscreens and design the cars to be driven without having to take your eyes off the road
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        That's pretty cool! I've heard a lot of good things about Mazda as well, including improving build quality and reliability.
      - rpmisms 5y ago
        Yes. Mazda has their head on straight re: UX and smart design. Very very enjoyable cars to drive, as well. Their motto is "zoom-zoom", which they embody well.
bondolo 5y ago
The only thing I liked about my c2003 Toshiba laptop was the physical controls; a volume dial and a wifi switch. I also did like the Blackberry dial, scrolling through messages on my mobile isn't as convenient one handed as it was with the dial.
rp1 5y ago
I too want knobs, but this line exemplifies why they're not coming back: > I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback. Will people get tired of having to look down every time they dial a number?
- webwielder2 5y ago
  Datedness of that speculation aside, was dialing numbers without looking at the keypad something people did a lot? Busy Wall Street types maybe?
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    My friend in college broke his phone's screen. But he kept using it for about a year without problems. He had every phone number memorised and could type messages without needing to look at the keyboard or the screen. You would be talking to him face to face and he could be typing out a message with his phone in his hand, inside his pocket.
  - nkozyra 5y ago
    Yeah. You could basically rest your fingers on a keypad like home keys and dial blind. Actually very useful when looking at a phone number, and a great deal faster
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Typing SMSes in school and college was easy with a classic keypad, and the error rates were very low... now even with watching the screen I make more mistakes than then.
  - tessierashpool 5y ago
    it was something literally every teenager and adult did. anybody who'd been using a phone for more than a year.
  - bnjms 5y ago
    More than numbers. We would write text messages without looking at the keypad. This required a lot more key presses than a number. I could text while shifting but it wasn’t till touchscreens that everyone decided laws needed to be passed. I miss k9. There were somehow fewer typos.
tuatoru 5y ago
> So what do product designers have against knobs? Several things. ... Then the piece omits the two overwhelmingly important reasons: cost and reliability. Knobs definitely are much better to use, but things with moving parts that stick out from the surface are not as reliable in population terms. Most people never have trouble, but that quintile that gives their stuff a hard time costs manufacturers a lot.
- bluedino 5y ago
  I'll take knobs over membrane buttons. Can't believe the entire appliance industry switched.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    High-end ovens, such as those above, say, $5k, almost always have knobs. I sure appreciate tuning knobs on car audio systems but almost no one besides Toyota and Lexus offer them any more.
    - destitude 5y ago
      Even though I have a "last gen" Subaru Outback I would never replace it with a new one because they put in a huge center console screen and removed the knobs for climate control. What is odd is the Subaru Ascent actually has knobs for all of this.
    - SyzygistSix 5y ago
      Old toaster oven took one action to change the temp - turn the knob. New toaster oven takes multiple actions to change the baking temperature. It's ridiculous.
    - finnh 5y ago
      Huh. When remodeling my kitchen in 2016 the highest priced ovens all had crappy touchscreens. I had to "downgrade" from Miele to Bosch to get knobs.
      - 5y ago
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jimmygrapes 5y ago
Alphonse Chapanis rolls fitfully in his grave whenever a new touchscreen is installed on a car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis
- juancb 5y ago
  That's a trend in general aviation and it's maddening. It's all of the problems this thread has raised about touch screens in cars but with added turbulence as an extra hurdle and spatial disorientation a safety risk. You can't just pull over and deal with the finicky touch screen.
vagrantJin 5y ago
I'm no old fuddy duddy. I'm not even 30 yet. We have a touchscreen hob - for no good reason. Its terrible
- reaperducer 5y ago
  My new apartment oven has a touch screen. My wife was cleaning it one day and managed to put the oven into Sabbath Mode. Which I didn't even know was a thing. And it turns out does the opposite of what I thought it would do.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    > And it turns out does the opposite of what I thought it would do. As a Jew, this amuses me greatly. :) That day you learned about one of our greatest loopholes. BTW fun fact, it doesn't count as work if you get a non-Jew to do it for you (or in this case, a computer).
SyzygistSix 5y ago
Seriously. Without a dedicated on/off/volume knob for the soundsystem, the driving experience is diminished drastically, no matter how nice the car. And of course touch is way better than eyesight when you are supposed to be paying attention to the road. As someone else said, rough motor skills are safer and more appropriate in a car then controls needing fine motor skills.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  touch is way better than eyesight when you are supposed to be paying attention to the road. Especially if you're one of the millions and millions of people who use different glasses for driving than you do for walking around.
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  I know this makes me a clueless annoying boring techie nerd :), but I still cannot properly fathom how this is a minority opinion. NOBODY in my non-techie group of friends or family cares. Not.even.remotely. I watch them struggle with their touch screens, I even listen to them rant, but when asked about it afterwards, it's fine. Just fine. Sexy. Sleek. Desirable. Why do I have to go and ruin everything? Honestly, even HVAC - I watch my family with "Auto HVAC" constantly fiddle with it, as they scroll to some meaningless numbers - 18C, 21C, 24C, back to 20C, etc all in the same drive. Whereas my ancient Subaru knob stays in the same position through the drive, without needing to ever look at it. If it's on the right, hot air will blow; if it's on the left, cold air will blow. Whereas with Auto, you literally never know what you're going to get. It's not on conscious level - everybody thinks their Auto A/C it's awesome. Until you watch their actual sub-conscious behaviour on a drive.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    I've had good automatic AC in a car, where it gets what I want most of the time. Most of the rentals I've driven get it too, but they work differently than what you have at home, insomuch as they control fan speed and temp, they should haves unload temp sensor too. Incidentally, I adjust my manual AC about as often as I do my automatic one.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
It's a cycle. Car designers went a bit crazy with buttons about 10 years ago. This was when bluetooth/carkits was becoming the norm and touchscreens were nowhere near good (cheap) enough. Or expected. So slightly older dashboards will feature upwards of 40 buttons while super modern ones will have none. In a few years they will go back to normal. As for smartphones, they are unfixable. Maybe tactile touchscreens will help in the iPhone 16 (or possibly even the iPhone 15S?)
mwcampbell 5y ago
I'll offer a contrary perspective that I haven't yet read here: Digital controls have the potential to be more accessible to people who can't turn a knob due to a mobility impairment. Edit: See also ndarilek's explanation of how his mobility-impaired girlfriend benefits from Alexa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344613
- atoav 5y ago
  Why not both?
  - toss1 5y ago
    My 2019 Ford Ranger has all three, opting for at least throwback one - On the dash, a volume knob w/on-off button in the center and tuning knob On the steering wheel, digital control buttons (L/R=tuning Up/Dn=volume) On the Screen, touch controls But that is all - the climate controls are all the damn flat, blend-it-all-in mini buttons or the touchscreen, so if the windscreen suddenly fogs up it's a few hazardous seconds while you have to keep looking back&forth at the controls and through fogged windscreen to find the [defrost] button. And yes, I use the knobs probably over half the time. The steering wheel controls are also nice because they can also be used by touch without looking. Probably used the touchscreen controls a couple times while stopped, mostly as a novelty. Gawd I wish designers would prioritize actual use over how good they think it'll look in some glossy brochure. and, frankly, at this point, I'd rather toss them all and have an ugly knob in a good spot I can use by feel (HINT: I'm NOT looking at it!!), than any flattened wall of pretty backlit buttons. I'm not lounging in a living room, idly caressing your damn panel, I'm driving a two-ton machine at speed.
- dghughes 5y ago
  The problem with that is digital controls are often made much smaller than its physical equivalent. Things like pill bottles have large diameter caps for people with dexterity problems. That same person may not be able to press a small flat "button" due to hand-eye co-ordination problems. Or they may not even be able to feel the surface with their fingertips. For myself I hate having to go tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap on a digital button when a quick twist of a knob does the same. At least have a slider digital control rather than discrete taps. Imagine instead of a doorknob to open a door you had to tap an electronic button 12 times.
jedberg 5y ago
I think Honda got this exactly right, at least in my 2018 car. There is a touchscreen that controls everything, but also physical knobs and buttons for the important stuff you'd want to control while keep your eyes on the road (radio volume, A/C, radio frequency, seat heaters, transmission gear, etc). If you want more detail and more options, you can go to the touchscreen, but if you just need the basics, you can do it without looking down.
- masklinn 5y ago
  Recently rented a small-ish Ford (a Puma) which had physical control for almost everything you'd want to adjust while driving, though the touchscreen was pretty crap (and didn't duplicate most of the physical controls, which I didn't mind). Also it had one of those infuriating pseudo-analog control wheels, where you can keep spinning and spinning the wheel with no effect once it reaches either end of its selection course (the ones where the selection wraps around is also bad, incidentally, probably worse really), thankfully it was for something of low importance (controlling the regime of the headlamps between off, DRL, standard, and automatic, which has an indicator on the dash).
  - stavros 5y ago
    My 2014 Mercedes has a clicky wheel/joystick combo with a menu system that doesn't wrap around, and it's excellent. I can always go to any item without looking because I know that 5up and 5left will go to the start of the menu (even if I don't remember which menu item I left it on, though it's almost always the music tab) and then I can navigate with the clicky wheel. No other controls, but very easy to use without looking.
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > My 2014 Mercedes has a clicky wheel/joystick combo with a menu system that doesn't wrap around, and it's excellent. I can always go to any item without looking because I know that 5up and 5left will go to the start of the menu (even if I don't remember which menu item I left it on, though it's almost always the music tab) and then I can navigate with the clicky wheel. Sure for a menu system control it makes complete sense. But the control I was talking about is completely specialised with a discrete number of steps, in that case having a wheel with proper stops is much more convenient. Also I misremembered, the headlamp mode was a wheel but one with proper stops, it was the selector for the ventilation throughput which didn't have stops and would just spin forever. And the modern peugeot I've driven have that for the drive mode selector (e.g. eco / normal / sport / whatever).
jedimastert 5y ago
Not a car, but my main gigging keyboard for as long as I've been gigging has been the Korg SV-1, and a big part of the reason is that there's no screens, only knobs. It's a pretty great interface, all in all. 90% of the time I use the presets I made for myself the first week I got it, but whenever I need something else I have no trouble doing it within seconds. It's fairly limited, in terms of features and sound bank, but it's amazing at what it does.
- dkersten 5y ago
  Also not a car: I have a speaker bar and the touch volume controls drive me crazy to the point that I've decided I will never again buy a soundsystem without proper buttons or knobs for volume.
- scarecrowbob 5y ago
  I got the SV-1 specifically because of the limited interface. Not a big fan of the organs, but the other stuff all has worked great for me. It's paid for itself several times over. My usual live keyboard setup is the SV-1 under an ASM hydrasynth.
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    Yeah, I think the organ is a pretty big missed opportunity, and it wouldn't have been so bad but the rotary simulator is really not great.
- ratww 5y ago
  I’m very happy that even the new generation of affordable synths is mostly analog with single function knobs. Arturia MicroFreak/MiniFreak, Korg Monologue/Minilogue, lots of Behringer clones. You can get productive with them in minutes rather than in days. Previous generations required either lots of menu diving (everything in the 90s) or had the pesky multifunction knobs (Microkorg).
- cbare 5y ago
  I love our very knobby Korg SV-2.
abakker 5y ago
I have to say, I’m optimistic about the controls in the Ineos Grenadier. I’m not sure I can afford one, but man, the dash design is good.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  Okay, now that is the kind of interior design I want in a car. I don't want an off-roader though, so I hope someone comes along and makes a sedan or a hatchback with similar interior design.
- chimen 5y ago
  Too bad it looks like a fridge and has a motor that consumes and pollutes a lot. Will make a great car for serious off-roaders and full time mommies picking up children from school no doubt.
  - abakker 5y ago
    One day, we’ll have reliable fast electric chargers and a backup for charging when off grid. I’ll bet that off road drivers would love to adopt electric motors if they could. The torque characteristics are great, regenerative braking is handy, and the lack of clutches is great. We’re not there yet, but Jeep is getting closer.
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roywiggins 5y ago
https://knobfeel.tumblr.com/ https://knobfeel.tumblr.com/
- guidoism 5y ago
  Nice! I still think about my 2000 VW Jetta. It had the most satisfying buttons and knobs. I still think about the substantial feed and knock of the button. Click seems like the wrong word to describe it. Compare the Audi A4 of the same vintage which has tinny clicky buttons that I hate.
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
The other issue with buttons is that typically buttons are flush-mount. That inevitably means you need to look at the button to press it. So it’s not just that you have awful feedback, even starting the process of engaging with the controls takes longer and requires eyes. Knobs and sliders can typically be found with muscle memory getting you first close enough to feel the “landscape” around the control, then use touch to find it exactly. Flush mount buttons almost completely prevent this.
smusamashah 5y ago
I recently found about "Aesthetic-usability Effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic%E2%80%93usability_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic%E2%80%93usability_ef... People find sleek looking things more usable even when they are actually not. There are no visible left/right click buttons on modern laptop touchpads. You get a sleek looking touchpad. Tap bottom left side harder to left click, right side to right click. There are still buttons beneath, but no, to designers eye they are somehow uglier than a flat broad spread out touchpad. It reminds of the Norman Doors ("Design of Everything"). Designers made the doors in a mall so sleek and plain and 'beautiful', there were no handles or boundaries between doors. And people would get stuck trying to push the wrong side. So much for 'beautiful' design.
- e-dt 5y ago
  Plus having separate left/right click buttons is much more reliable. My laptop's touchpad periodically expands when I leave it out in the heat, which sticks the left of the touchpad to the chassis so that I can only right click.
- BeefWellington 5y ago
  I think there's limits to these kinds of effects if it's actually a thing you interact with on what I'll call (for lack of a better term coming to mind) a blue collar basis. My reasoning (story time): I got hired to fix up a piece of custom-built software that was essentially the core business function for a series of medical clinics. They'd spent quite a bit of money to replace an older DOS system with a fancy new .net app. It was flashy, sleek looking, but also slow, buggy, and hard to use for the staff who did 99% of the work within it. Part of my analysis involved looking at the software they were using before the new .net app they paid for, which was something they'd kept alive probably a decade past its best before date by running old versions of Windows or running it on Dosbox. The staff loved the ancient thing and hated the new modern thing because the new modern thing made everything about their jobs harder, despite being much easier on the eyes and displaying a lot more information on-screen. The old DOS app was built to be used keyboard-only, so it was much faster than using a mouse for 99% of data entry things, which was the bulk of what people were doing with the app. By contrast, the development house that built the .net app to replace it didn't seem to even know what tabindex was for. Literally you couldn't tab around any screen in the app in any kind of sensible workflow way. It took a while to fix it up but the thing that always stuck with me about that job was just how much one particular front office staff member thanked me profusely because she could now use the keyboard for everything again. There was a valuable lesson in it for me about the pitfalls of shiny vs functional.
solarkraft 5y ago
> I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback. Will people get tired of having to look down every time they dial a number? I love this question because of the easy answer: No! But that’s because it’s only a tiny part of using a smartphone and other things are more important. The challenge for designers is generally to strike the right balance between immediate accessibility and findability of less common stuff. Adjusting the speaker volume is obviously a common action that should be possible quickly and blindly. But if I want to change something uncommon I’d rather look through a well labeled menu hierarchy than wildly placed buttons and knobs.
Animats 5y ago
Someone needs to invent something new. More tactile than a touchscreen, and with a cost no worse than a bunch of knobs. Disney has tried.[1] [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-future-of-tactile-touch-screens https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-future-of-ta...
- jrootabega 5y ago
  Apple's Taptics seems perfect, and it's been around for a long time now.
coding123 5y ago
Maybe someone can provide a bolt-on board that communicates to these new cars overwifi. The board would have tactile knobs for radio, wiper, AC controls, and maybe a cigarette adapter too. The mounting of it would be 4 screws that are screwed directly into the screen. Just vacuum any glass bits that fall to the floor after.
Koshkin 5y ago
A touch glass cockpit is perfect in a spaceship, good in an airplane or a boat, and an abomination in a car.
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  I disagree overall (you're definitely right about it being an abomination in cars though). Touchscreens are bad when they move (spaceship launch, air turbulance, waves, uneven road). There's also a direct relationship with how bad touchscreens are, with how often you need to 'keep your eyes on the road'. Space, you don't really have to look out the window, planes you don't really need to look if you're IFR in IMC, boats rarely have traffic on the open water and don't have to stay in a narrow lane, cars have lots of traffic and narrow lanes. So I wouldn't say "perfect" or "good", but perhaps you meant various degrees of "forgiving"?
  - pepoluan 5y ago
    For spaceships, I think it's a given that launch should be automated; too many things happening rapidly to be handled by human beings. In space, though, actions are more forgiving to a certain degree, timing are usually more relaxed.
tonymet 5y ago
Responsiveness has many facets. tactile feedback (like the solid click of a rocker ), visual distinction , feedback latency (how many milliseconds between input and taking action), tactile distinction (can you distinguish the control without looking at it), audible distinction . soft buttons , soft logic controllers and touch UIs fail at all of the above the result is a sluggish, frustrating and counterintuitive experience when engaging with the world around you . we replaced our kitchen range with a new budget model. they replaced the analog oven settings with a keypad . the old model could be activated in 1/2 second blindfolded by turning the knob. you could see the setting from across the room eg when heading out the door. the new range requires 3 button presses and holding the temp control button for 45 seconds while the temp slowly seeks 5 degree increments. what sadist designs these systems? they can’t possibly be using them in their own homes.
- ziml77 5y ago
  Have you tried tapping the button instead of holding it? You can usually change the values a lot faster that way. But I'm with you on it being stupid. I'm fine with the temperature control being digital (I've had issues with multiple non-digital ovens having too much inaccuracy in their temperature control), but there should be a knob to change the temperature.
  - tonymet 5y ago
    you’re right that this sometimes works , but on this control panel the button doesn’t respond
nsonha 5y ago
Ideal cockpit panel is one with a bunch of knob and a bunch of switch with e-ink label that allow you to freely reassign, and maybe a resitive instead of capacitive touch screen for some odds thing. They are less prone to accidently touching and work with gloves
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Reassigning functions during use or over the course of ownership is a Very Bad Idea. Even for professional commercial pilots there are numerous aircraft accidents which can be attributed to "alternate law" (different control-system response modes) engaging or disengaging at different times, often without clearly notifying flight crew of this fact. And this is an issue for operators trained and licensed to specific aircraft, instrumentation, and variants. Air France 447 is a classic example of this. The case for automobile operators, many of whom receive cursory training at best early in their driving careers and carry this forward for decades, often operating novel or unfamiliar vehicles (rentals, borrowed from a friend, acting as a relief driver during a long trip) is simply a recipe for disaster. Control functions should not change after designation, with the possible exception of auxiliary controls not critical to overall vehicle performance or function, or those which are accessed and used only when the vehicle is not in motion (e.g., diagnostics or repair information / interfaces).
albert_e 5y ago
My dream -- Physical knobs and buttons (preferably with universal indicators of current state) for mic mute/unmute, camera on/off, volume. Laptops can have either built in or a usb/wireless accessory. Mobiles also need physical buttons if not knobs. Edit to add: A raspberry pi zero or less and commodity buttons / dials in a well designed case should easily work for this. I know some streamdeck projects exist but not sure if they specifically aim for knobs and other tactile UX. Any projects in this space we can get behind or emulate?
- wruza 5y ago
  Add a screen brightness knob and sign me up. My monitor ($750 few years ago) has only 3 levels of brightness effectively, because to change it you have to go through a hierarchical menu of around 10 clicks of different buttons, and then wait for a stupid bar to go to the desired value. I had to create 3 presets to at least switch day/evening/night modes with only 3-4 clicks.
- pitspotter2 5y ago
  Additionally I would like knurling on the knobs and muted musical tones to provide feedback, not the blaring monotonous beeps of today. Star Trek TNG was wrong about the desirability of flat screen interfaces but right about audible feedback.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    TNG designers (Sternbach, Okida) waved it away by saying the touchscreens had tactile interfaces that reconfigured based on the interface/user. Best of both worlds.
- deleted 5y ago
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chaboud 5y ago
For me the biggest reason knobs are useful in a car can be observed by the surface-exposed HVAC dials of the early 2000s Impala (axis-aligned with X or Pitch axis): If you're twisting a knob with two fingers and hit a bump, the anti-directional nature of the contact points on the knob cancels out the translation injected by a bump in the road. The 2000's Impala showed that analog on the X axis and analog on the Z axis are very different, as it was virtually impossible to set the temperature accurately in an Impala if moving (still not the worst thing about that car, not even close). This is why steering wheels are very effective input mechanisms. If you're jostling around, the wheel still doesn't rotate. Try driving one-handed on a bouncy road. I bet your hand goes to the top or bottom of the wheel intuitively. I do appreciate when auto manufacturers who use touch screens put the screen near an edge or lip that I can use to stabilize by hand, but day to day controls should really have dedicated dials, knobs, and (at least) buttons.
samizdis 5y ago
I am all for the knobs, especially for driving, but going retro now would probably add silly costs to manufacturing, so that ship has sailed. I don't use voice controls in the house (Alexa et al) because creepy listeners. But in a car, I'd prefer decent voice controls for sound and heating etc over touchscreen menus.
roelb 5y ago
The approach should be digital knobs, which work relative to their setting and roll-through endlessly magnetically. So software can react, but user is in control. The worst change in recent years is kitchen plates all having these horrible touch systems or magnetic detachable knobs. It's horribly slow in usage, monster learning curve, locking systems which all behave differently, fails when wet. It's so over-designed and over-engineered. It's so bad. Just provide a knob for **'s sake and when you turn it right, it turns on.
- kekeko 5y ago
  The amount of burnt index fingers I've seen with friends and family on these modern cooking stoves is hilarious.
  - jlpom 5y ago
    Me too. If the content overspills you can't shut off the plaque because the control become unusable ('hot' or liquid on the surface displayed), which often leads to more overspills /autocatalyse.
- UweSchmidt 5y ago
  My current car has endless knobs: If I set the volume to 0 the software pauses a recording so I can no longer skip unwanted parts without messing with fast-forward while driving. These smart knobs invite designers to mess with basic functionality that has worked for decades (play, pause, rewind, fast forward) Occasionally, due to a bug, on cold winter mornings when I set the heating to max, I won't get warm air even after I've driven for a while and the engine is already hot. I then have to move the knob to cold and hot again for the software to register and finally give me some warmth. I'd like chickenhead knobs that are connected to the functionality as direct as possible, please!
jbverschoor 5y ago
Well, we all know what happened to Apple's touchbar.
nbzso 5y ago
When profit centered design enters the building, human centered design jumps out of the window. Rationalizing this with thousand UX cases and cluttered UI is not a solution to the user problems. But the users buy this stuff and so the things go on.
teleforce 5y ago
I watched car reviews a lot to the point that it's probably not healthy for a person. Interestingly, most of professional car reviewers prefer physical knobs over digital or haptic. One of the modern cars that I really admire in term of innovations and utilities is the new Hyundai Santa Cruz. For better or worse, Hyundai is bringing back knobs for volume and climate control before it has even reach full year in US soil perhaps due to the many complaints they have received over the several months since it's launched [1]. But come on, the most intuitive control interface is not digital, haptic or analog, they all interfere badly while you're driving. The most intuitive with the least interference is your voices. Somehow all of the recent cars being reviewed has hit-and-miss for their voice recognition accuracy. If we as human race cannot even get the basic voice recognition right, how can we expect level 5 fully autonomous driving that being touted to arrive sooner rather than later? [1]https://youtu.be/LeIjjyaE7j4 https://youtu.be/LeIjjyaE7j4
itsjustmath 5y ago
Bret Victor's 'Brief rant on the future of interaction design' is a worthwhile read on the same subject: http://worrydream.com/#!/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign http://worrydream.com/#!/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionD... > Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

254 points by Kaibeezy 5y ago

Digital vehicle temperature control is just infuriating. There are only two settings: blast the driver with freezing air until the rest of the car cools down, or roast the driver alive until the rest of the car warms up.

charcircuit 5y ago
I personally only ever set the temperature to max hot or max cold. Then I adjust fan speed if it's too much.
ziml77 5y ago
I've always dealt with that by just adjusting vents. If the A/C is freezing me, I point the vents a bit over me. If I'm very hot for some reason then I'll adjust one or more of the vents to point right at me.

cmclaughlin 5y ago

Also not a car - but I recently got a gas fireplace insert that came with a remote control with a touch screen. It takes a few seconds for the remote to “boot up” every time I try to use it. Long enough for me to get frustrated and look away. But if I don’t stay focused the screen will turn off and I’ll have to start over. It’s frustrating enough that I’ve started research “dumb” remotes with real buttons

frankosaurus 5y ago

IMO, much worse than touch screen buttons is touch screen glare. Driving westward in the mornings, sunlight is reflected directly off my car's touch screen into my eyes. Everything on the dash needs to be matte -- it's a safety issue.

jrootabega 5y ago
I'd say anything in the car, really, but mostly the stuff in front of your eyes. My car has some chrome-like trim on the steering wheel, gear shift, etc. (It's a cheap car, so this is not just a case of it being luxury trim.) The sun occasionally hits them at the right angle to blast straight into my eyes. It's not frequent, but in the wrong circumstances it could cause an accident. Even once is unacceptable.

rpmisms 5y ago

If it's an analog system, I want analog input. If it's a digital system, I want good digital input or excellent tactile input. Stereo: well-weighted analog knobs that are responsive. Computer: mechanical keyboard. Car: Manual Transmission.

rsj_hn 5y ago
what do you drive?
- rpmisms 5y ago
  Sold my manual for a Tesla. I drive my wife's manual Mazda when I want to enjoy the driving experience. Tesla does have good digital inputs, but very little about the car is analog, so I think I'm being consistent.
  - hoppla 5y ago
    My next car might be a mazda because of this: https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-purging-touchscreens-from-its-vehicles https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur... TLDR; They are removing touchscreens and design the cars to be driven without having to take your eyes off the road
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      That's pretty cool! I've heard a lot of good things about Mazda as well, including improving build quality and reliability.
    - rpmisms 5y ago
      Yes. Mazda has their head on straight re: UX and smart design. Very very enjoyable cars to drive, as well. Their motto is "zoom-zoom", which they embody well.

bondolo 5y ago

The only thing I liked about my c2003 Toshiba laptop was the physical controls; a volume dial and a wifi switch. I also did like the Blackberry dial, scrolling through messages on my mobile isn't as convenient one handed as it was with the dial.

rp1 5y ago

I too want knobs, but this line exemplifies why they're not coming back: > I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback. Will people get tired of having to look down every time they dial a number?

webwielder2 5y ago
Datedness of that speculation aside, was dialing numbers without looking at the keypad something people did a lot? Busy Wall Street types maybe?
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  My friend in college broke his phone's screen. But he kept using it for about a year without problems. He had every phone number memorised and could type messages without needing to look at the keyboard or the screen. You would be talking to him face to face and he could be typing out a message with his phone in his hand, inside his pocket.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  Yeah. You could basically rest your fingers on a keypad like home keys and dial blind. Actually very useful when looking at a phone number, and a great deal faster
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Typing SMSes in school and college was easy with a classic keypad, and the error rates were very low... now even with watching the screen I make more mistakes than then.
- tessierashpool 5y ago
  it was something literally every teenager and adult did. anybody who'd been using a phone for more than a year.
- bnjms 5y ago
  More than numbers. We would write text messages without looking at the keypad. This required a lot more key presses than a number. I could text while shifting but it wasn’t till touchscreens that everyone decided laws needed to be passed. I miss k9. There were somehow fewer typos.

tuatoru 5y ago

> So what do product designers have against knobs? Several things. ... Then the piece omits the two overwhelmingly important reasons: cost and reliability. Knobs definitely are much better to use, but things with moving parts that stick out from the surface are not as reliable in population terms. Most people never have trouble, but that quintile that gives their stuff a hard time costs manufacturers a lot.

bluedino 5y ago
I'll take knobs over membrane buttons. Can't believe the entire appliance industry switched.
- Wistar 5y ago
  High-end ovens, such as those above, say, $5k, almost always have knobs. I sure appreciate tuning knobs on car audio systems but almost no one besides Toyota and Lexus offer them any more.
  - destitude 5y ago
    Even though I have a "last gen" Subaru Outback I would never replace it with a new one because they put in a huge center console screen and removed the knobs for climate control. What is odd is the Subaru Ascent actually has knobs for all of this.
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    Old toaster oven took one action to change the temp - turn the knob. New toaster oven takes multiple actions to change the baking temperature. It's ridiculous.
  - finnh 5y ago
    Huh. When remodeling my kitchen in 2016 the highest priced ovens all had crappy touchscreens. I had to "downgrade" from Miele to Bosch to get knobs.
    - 5y ago

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jimmygrapes 5y ago

Alphonse Chapanis rolls fitfully in his grave whenever a new touchscreen is installed on a car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Chapanis

juancb 5y ago
That's a trend in general aviation and it's maddening. It's all of the problems this thread has raised about touch screens in cars but with added turbulence as an extra hurdle and spatial disorientation a safety risk. You can't just pull over and deal with the finicky touch screen.

vagrantJin 5y ago

I'm no old fuddy duddy. I'm not even 30 yet. We have a touchscreen hob - for no good reason. Its terrible

reaperducer 5y ago
My new apartment oven has a touch screen. My wife was cleaning it one day and managed to put the oven into Sabbath Mode. Which I didn't even know was a thing. And it turns out does the opposite of what I thought it would do.
- jedberg 5y ago
  > And it turns out does the opposite of what I thought it would do. As a Jew, this amuses me greatly. :) That day you learned about one of our greatest loopholes. BTW fun fact, it doesn't count as work if you get a non-Jew to do it for you (or in this case, a computer).

SyzygistSix 5y ago

Seriously. Without a dedicated on/off/volume knob for the soundsystem, the driving experience is diminished drastically, no matter how nice the car. And of course touch is way better than eyesight when you are supposed to be paying attention to the road. As someone else said, rough motor skills are safer and more appropriate in a car then controls needing fine motor skills.

reaperducer 5y ago
touch is way better than eyesight when you are supposed to be paying attention to the road. Especially if you're one of the millions and millions of people who use different glasses for driving than you do for walking around.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
I know this makes me a clueless annoying boring techie nerd :), but I still cannot properly fathom how this is a minority opinion. NOBODY in my non-techie group of friends or family cares. Not.even.remotely. I watch them struggle with their touch screens, I even listen to them rant, but when asked about it afterwards, it's fine. Just fine. Sexy. Sleek. Desirable. Why do I have to go and ruin everything? Honestly, even HVAC - I watch my family with "Auto HVAC" constantly fiddle with it, as they scroll to some meaningless numbers - 18C, 21C, 24C, back to 20C, etc all in the same drive. Whereas my ancient Subaru knob stays in the same position through the drive, without needing to ever look at it. If it's on the right, hot air will blow; if it's on the left, cold air will blow. Whereas with Auto, you literally never know what you're going to get. It's not on conscious level - everybody thinks their Auto A/C it's awesome. Until you watch their actual sub-conscious behaviour on a drive.
- Aloha 5y ago
  I've had good automatic AC in a car, where it gets what I want most of the time. Most of the rentals I've driven get it too, but they work differently than what you have at home, insomuch as they control fan speed and temp, they should haves unload temp sensor too. Incidentally, I adjust my manual AC about as often as I do my automatic one.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

It's a cycle. Car designers went a bit crazy with buttons about 10 years ago. This was when bluetooth/carkits was becoming the norm and touchscreens were nowhere near good (cheap) enough. Or expected. So slightly older dashboards will feature upwards of 40 buttons while super modern ones will have none. In a few years they will go back to normal. As for smartphones, they are unfixable. Maybe tactile touchscreens will help in the iPhone 16 (or possibly even the iPhone 15S?)

mwcampbell 5y ago

I'll offer a contrary perspective that I haven't yet read here: Digital controls have the potential to be more accessible to people who can't turn a knob due to a mobility impairment. Edit: See also ndarilek's explanation of how his mobility-impaired girlfriend benefits from Alexa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20344613

atoav 5y ago
Why not both?
- toss1 5y ago
  My 2019 Ford Ranger has all three, opting for at least throwback one - On the dash, a volume knob w/on-off button in the center and tuning knob On the steering wheel, digital control buttons (L/R=tuning Up/Dn=volume) On the Screen, touch controls But that is all - the climate controls are all the damn flat, blend-it-all-in mini buttons or the touchscreen, so if the windscreen suddenly fogs up it's a few hazardous seconds while you have to keep looking back&forth at the controls and through fogged windscreen to find the [defrost] button. And yes, I use the knobs probably over half the time. The steering wheel controls are also nice because they can also be used by touch without looking. Probably used the touchscreen controls a couple times while stopped, mostly as a novelty. Gawd I wish designers would prioritize actual use over how good they think it'll look in some glossy brochure. and, frankly, at this point, I'd rather toss them all and have an ugly knob in a good spot I can use by feel (HINT: I'm NOT looking at it!!), than any flattened wall of pretty backlit buttons. I'm not lounging in a living room, idly caressing your damn panel, I'm driving a two-ton machine at speed.
dghughes 5y ago
The problem with that is digital controls are often made much smaller than its physical equivalent. Things like pill bottles have large diameter caps for people with dexterity problems. That same person may not be able to press a small flat "button" due to hand-eye co-ordination problems. Or they may not even be able to feel the surface with their fingertips. For myself I hate having to go tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap on a digital button when a quick twist of a knob does the same. At least have a slider digital control rather than discrete taps. Imagine instead of a doorknob to open a door you had to tap an electronic button 12 times.

jedberg 5y ago

I think Honda got this exactly right, at least in my 2018 car. There is a touchscreen that controls everything, but also physical knobs and buttons for the important stuff you'd want to control while keep your eyes on the road (radio volume, A/C, radio frequency, seat heaters, transmission gear, etc). If you want more detail and more options, you can go to the touchscreen, but if you just need the basics, you can do it without looking down.

masklinn 5y ago
Recently rented a small-ish Ford (a Puma) which had physical control for almost everything you'd want to adjust while driving, though the touchscreen was pretty crap (and didn't duplicate most of the physical controls, which I didn't mind). Also it had one of those infuriating pseudo-analog control wheels, where you can keep spinning and spinning the wheel with no effect once it reaches either end of its selection course (the ones where the selection wraps around is also bad, incidentally, probably worse really), thankfully it was for something of low importance (controlling the regime of the headlamps between off, DRL, standard, and automatic, which has an indicator on the dash).
- stavros 5y ago
  My 2014 Mercedes has a clicky wheel/joystick combo with a menu system that doesn't wrap around, and it's excellent. I can always go to any item without looking because I know that 5up and 5left will go to the start of the menu (even if I don't remember which menu item I left it on, though it's almost always the music tab) and then I can navigate with the clicky wheel. No other controls, but very easy to use without looking.
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > My 2014 Mercedes has a clicky wheel/joystick combo with a menu system that doesn't wrap around, and it's excellent. I can always go to any item without looking because I know that 5up and 5left will go to the start of the menu (even if I don't remember which menu item I left it on, though it's almost always the music tab) and then I can navigate with the clicky wheel. Sure for a menu system control it makes complete sense. But the control I was talking about is completely specialised with a discrete number of steps, in that case having a wheel with proper stops is much more convenient. Also I misremembered, the headlamp mode was a wheel but one with proper stops, it was the selector for the ventilation throughput which didn't have stops and would just spin forever. And the modern peugeot I've driven have that for the drive mode selector (e.g. eco / normal / sport / whatever).

jedimastert 5y ago

Not a car, but my main gigging keyboard for as long as I've been gigging has been the Korg SV-1, and a big part of the reason is that there's no screens, only knobs. It's a pretty great interface, all in all. 90% of the time I use the presets I made for myself the first week I got it, but whenever I need something else I have no trouble doing it within seconds. It's fairly limited, in terms of features and sound bank, but it's amazing at what it does.

dkersten 5y ago
Also not a car: I have a speaker bar and the touch volume controls drive me crazy to the point that I've decided I will never again buy a soundsystem without proper buttons or knobs for volume.
scarecrowbob 5y ago
I got the SV-1 specifically because of the limited interface. Not a big fan of the organs, but the other stuff all has worked great for me. It's paid for itself several times over. My usual live keyboard setup is the SV-1 under an ASM hydrasynth.
- jedimastert 5y ago
  Yeah, I think the organ is a pretty big missed opportunity, and it wouldn't have been so bad but the rotary simulator is really not great.
ratww 5y ago
I’m very happy that even the new generation of affordable synths is mostly analog with single function knobs. Arturia MicroFreak/MiniFreak, Korg Monologue/Minilogue, lots of Behringer clones. You can get productive with them in minutes rather than in days. Previous generations required either lots of menu diving (everything in the 90s) or had the pesky multifunction knobs (Microkorg).
cbare 5y ago
I love our very knobby Korg SV-2.

abakker 5y ago

I have to say, I’m optimistic about the controls in the Ineos Grenadier. I’m not sure I can afford one, but man, the dash design is good.

frosted-flakes 5y ago
Okay, now that is the kind of interior design I want in a car. I don't want an off-roader though, so I hope someone comes along and makes a sedan or a hatchback with similar interior design.
chimen 5y ago
Too bad it looks like a fridge and has a motor that consumes and pollutes a lot. Will make a great car for serious off-roaders and full time mommies picking up children from school no doubt.
- abakker 5y ago
  One day, we’ll have reliable fast electric chargers and a backup for charging when off grid. I’ll bet that off road drivers would love to adopt electric motors if they could. The torque characteristics are great, regenerative braking is handy, and the lack of clutches is great. We’re not there yet, but Jeep is getting closer.

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roywiggins 5y ago

https://knobfeel.tumblr.com/ https://knobfeel.tumblr.com/

guidoism 5y ago
Nice! I still think about my 2000 VW Jetta. It had the most satisfying buttons and knobs. I still think about the substantial feed and knock of the button. Click seems like the wrong word to describe it. Compare the Audi A4 of the same vintage which has tinny clicky buttons that I hate.

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

The other issue with buttons is that typically buttons are flush-mount. That inevitably means you need to look at the button to press it. So it’s not just that you have awful feedback, even starting the process of engaging with the controls takes longer and requires eyes. Knobs and sliders can typically be found with muscle memory getting you first close enough to feel the “landscape” around the control, then use touch to find it exactly. Flush mount buttons almost completely prevent this.

smusamashah 5y ago

I recently found about "Aesthetic-usability Effect" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic%E2%80%93usability_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetic%E2%80%93usability_ef... People find sleek looking things more usable even when they are actually not. There are no visible left/right click buttons on modern laptop touchpads. You get a sleek looking touchpad. Tap bottom left side harder to left click, right side to right click. There are still buttons beneath, but no, to designers eye they are somehow uglier than a flat broad spread out touchpad. It reminds of the Norman Doors ("Design of Everything"). Designers made the doors in a mall so sleek and plain and 'beautiful', there were no handles or boundaries between doors. And people would get stuck trying to push the wrong side. So much for 'beautiful' design.

e-dt 5y ago
Plus having separate left/right click buttons is much more reliable. My laptop's touchpad periodically expands when I leave it out in the heat, which sticks the left of the touchpad to the chassis so that I can only right click.
BeefWellington 5y ago
I think there's limits to these kinds of effects if it's actually a thing you interact with on what I'll call (for lack of a better term coming to mind) a blue collar basis. My reasoning (story time): I got hired to fix up a piece of custom-built software that was essentially the core business function for a series of medical clinics. They'd spent quite a bit of money to replace an older DOS system with a fancy new .net app. It was flashy, sleek looking, but also slow, buggy, and hard to use for the staff who did 99% of the work within it. Part of my analysis involved looking at the software they were using before the new .net app they paid for, which was something they'd kept alive probably a decade past its best before date by running old versions of Windows or running it on Dosbox. The staff loved the ancient thing and hated the new modern thing because the new modern thing made everything about their jobs harder, despite being much easier on the eyes and displaying a lot more information on-screen. The old DOS app was built to be used keyboard-only, so it was much faster than using a mouse for 99% of data entry things, which was the bulk of what people were doing with the app. By contrast, the development house that built the .net app to replace it didn't seem to even know what tabindex was for. Literally you couldn't tab around any screen in the app in any kind of sensible workflow way. It took a while to fix it up but the thing that always stuck with me about that job was just how much one particular front office staff member thanked me profusely because she could now use the keyboard for everything again. There was a valuable lesson in it for me about the pitfalls of shiny vs functional.

solarkraft 5y ago

> I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback. Will people get tired of having to look down every time they dial a number? I love this question because of the easy answer: No! But that’s because it’s only a tiny part of using a smartphone and other things are more important. The challenge for designers is generally to strike the right balance between immediate accessibility and findability of less common stuff. Adjusting the speaker volume is obviously a common action that should be possible quickly and blindly. But if I want to change something uncommon I’d rather look through a well labeled menu hierarchy than wildly placed buttons and knobs.

Animats 5y ago

Someone needs to invent something new. More tactile than a touchscreen, and with a cost no worse than a bunch of knobs. Disney has tried.[1] [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-future-of-tactile-touch-screens https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/the-future-of-ta...

jrootabega 5y ago
Apple's Taptics seems perfect, and it's been around for a long time now.

coding123 5y ago

Maybe someone can provide a bolt-on board that communicates to these new cars overwifi. The board would have tactile knobs for radio, wiper, AC controls, and maybe a cigarette adapter too. The mounting of it would be 4 screws that are screwed directly into the screen. Just vacuum any glass bits that fall to the floor after.

Koshkin 5y ago

A touch glass cockpit is perfect in a spaceship, good in an airplane or a boat, and an abomination in a car.

MerelyMortal 5y ago
I disagree overall (you're definitely right about it being an abomination in cars though). Touchscreens are bad when they move (spaceship launch, air turbulance, waves, uneven road). There's also a direct relationship with how bad touchscreens are, with how often you need to 'keep your eyes on the road'. Space, you don't really have to look out the window, planes you don't really need to look if you're IFR in IMC, boats rarely have traffic on the open water and don't have to stay in a narrow lane, cars have lots of traffic and narrow lanes. So I wouldn't say "perfect" or "good", but perhaps you meant various degrees of "forgiving"?
- pepoluan 5y ago
  For spaceships, I think it's a given that launch should be automated; too many things happening rapidly to be handled by human beings. In space, though, actions are more forgiving to a certain degree, timing are usually more relaxed.

tonymet 5y ago

Responsiveness has many facets. tactile feedback (like the solid click of a rocker ), visual distinction , feedback latency (how many milliseconds between input and taking action), tactile distinction (can you distinguish the control without looking at it), audible distinction . soft buttons , soft logic controllers and touch UIs fail at all of the above the result is a sluggish, frustrating and counterintuitive experience when engaging with the world around you . we replaced our kitchen range with a new budget model. they replaced the analog oven settings with a keypad . the old model could be activated in 1/2 second blindfolded by turning the knob. you could see the setting from across the room eg when heading out the door. the new range requires 3 button presses and holding the temp control button for 45 seconds while the temp slowly seeks 5 degree increments. what sadist designs these systems? they can’t possibly be using them in their own homes.

ziml77 5y ago
Have you tried tapping the button instead of holding it? You can usually change the values a lot faster that way. But I'm with you on it being stupid. I'm fine with the temperature control being digital (I've had issues with multiple non-digital ovens having too much inaccuracy in their temperature control), but there should be a knob to change the temperature.
- tonymet 5y ago
  you’re right that this sometimes works , but on this control panel the button doesn’t respond

nsonha 5y ago

Ideal cockpit panel is one with a bunch of knob and a bunch of switch with e-ink label that allow you to freely reassign, and maybe a resitive instead of capacitive touch screen for some odds thing. They are less prone to accidently touching and work with gloves

dredmorbius 5y ago
Reassigning functions during use or over the course of ownership is a Very Bad Idea. Even for professional commercial pilots there are numerous aircraft accidents which can be attributed to "alternate law" (different control-system response modes) engaging or disengaging at different times, often without clearly notifying flight crew of this fact. And this is an issue for operators trained and licensed to specific aircraft, instrumentation, and variants. Air France 447 is a classic example of this. The case for automobile operators, many of whom receive cursory training at best early in their driving careers and carry this forward for decades, often operating novel or unfamiliar vehicles (rentals, borrowed from a friend, acting as a relief driver during a long trip) is simply a recipe for disaster. Control functions should not change after designation, with the possible exception of auxiliary controls not critical to overall vehicle performance or function, or those which are accessed and used only when the vehicle is not in motion (e.g., diagnostics or repair information / interfaces).

albert_e 5y ago

My dream -- Physical knobs and buttons (preferably with universal indicators of current state) for mic mute/unmute, camera on/off, volume. Laptops can have either built in or a usb/wireless accessory. Mobiles also need physical buttons if not knobs. Edit to add: A raspberry pi zero or less and commodity buttons / dials in a well designed case should easily work for this. I know some streamdeck projects exist but not sure if they specifically aim for knobs and other tactile UX. Any projects in this space we can get behind or emulate?

wruza 5y ago
Add a screen brightness knob and sign me up. My monitor ($750 few years ago) has only 3 levels of brightness effectively, because to change it you have to go through a hierarchical menu of around 10 clicks of different buttons, and then wait for a stupid bar to go to the desired value. I had to create 3 presets to at least switch day/evening/night modes with only 3-4 clicks.
pitspotter2 5y ago
Additionally I would like knurling on the knobs and muted musical tones to provide feedback, not the blaring monotonous beeps of today. Star Trek TNG was wrong about the desirability of flat screen interfaces but right about audible feedback.
- midasuni 5y ago
  TNG designers (Sternbach, Okida) waved it away by saying the touchscreens had tactile interfaces that reconfigured based on the interface/user. Best of both worlds.
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chaboud 5y ago

For me the biggest reason knobs are useful in a car can be observed by the surface-exposed HVAC dials of the early 2000s Impala (axis-aligned with X or Pitch axis): If you're twisting a knob with two fingers and hit a bump, the anti-directional nature of the contact points on the knob cancels out the translation injected by a bump in the road. The 2000's Impala showed that analog on the X axis and analog on the Z axis are very different, as it was virtually impossible to set the temperature accurately in an Impala if moving (still not the worst thing about that car, not even close). This is why steering wheels are very effective input mechanisms. If you're jostling around, the wheel still doesn't rotate. Try driving one-handed on a bouncy road. I bet your hand goes to the top or bottom of the wheel intuitively. I do appreciate when auto manufacturers who use touch screens put the screen near an edge or lip that I can use to stabilize by hand, but day to day controls should really have dedicated dials, knobs, and (at least) buttons.

samizdis 5y ago

I am all for the knobs, especially for driving, but going retro now would probably add silly costs to manufacturing, so that ship has sailed. I don't use voice controls in the house (Alexa et al) because creepy listeners. But in a car, I'd prefer decent voice controls for sound and heating etc over touchscreen menus.

roelb 5y ago

The approach should be digital knobs, which work relative to their setting and roll-through endlessly magnetically. So software can react, but user is in control. The worst change in recent years is kitchen plates all having these horrible touch systems or magnetic detachable knobs. It's horribly slow in usage, monster learning curve, locking systems which all behave differently, fails when wet. It's so over-designed and over-engineered. It's so bad. Just provide a knob for **'s sake and when you turn it right, it turns on.

kekeko 5y ago
The amount of burnt index fingers I've seen with friends and family on these modern cooking stoves is hilarious.
- jlpom 5y ago
  Me too. If the content overspills you can't shut off the plaque because the control become unusable ('hot' or liquid on the surface displayed), which often leads to more overspills /autocatalyse.
UweSchmidt 5y ago
My current car has endless knobs: If I set the volume to 0 the software pauses a recording so I can no longer skip unwanted parts without messing with fast-forward while driving. These smart knobs invite designers to mess with basic functionality that has worked for decades (play, pause, rewind, fast forward) Occasionally, due to a bug, on cold winter mornings when I set the heating to max, I won't get warm air even after I've driven for a while and the engine is already hot. I then have to move the knob to cold and hot again for the software to register and finally give me some warmth. I'd like chickenhead knobs that are connected to the functionality as direct as possible, please!

jbverschoor 5y ago

Well, we all know what happened to Apple's touchbar.

nbzso 5y ago

When profit centered design enters the building, human centered design jumps out of the window. Rationalizing this with thousand UX cases and cluttered UI is not a solution to the user problems. But the users buy this stuff and so the things go on.

teleforce 5y ago

I watched car reviews a lot to the point that it's probably not healthy for a person. Interestingly, most of professional car reviewers prefer physical knobs over digital or haptic. One of the modern cars that I really admire in term of innovations and utilities is the new Hyundai Santa Cruz. For better or worse, Hyundai is bringing back knobs for volume and climate control before it has even reach full year in US soil perhaps due to the many complaints they have received over the several months since it's launched [1]. But come on, the most intuitive control interface is not digital, haptic or analog, they all interfere badly while you're driving. The most intuitive with the least interference is your voices. Somehow all of the recent cars being reviewed has hit-and-miss for their voice recognition accuracy. If we as human race cannot even get the basic voice recognition right, how can we expect level 5 fully autonomous driving that being touted to arrive sooner rather than later? [1]https://youtu.be/LeIjjyaE7j4 https://youtu.be/LeIjjyaE7j4

itsjustmath 5y ago

Bret Victor's 'Brief rant on the future of interaction design' is a worthwhile read on the same subject: http://worrydream.com/#!/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign http://worrydream.com/#!/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionD... > Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.