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This article strangely undersells the advantages of low tech. It's true that they're not better for everything, but they have advantages well beyond the basic t

by sfink 4y ago

This article strangely undersells the advantages of low tech. It's true that they're not better for everything, but they have advantages well beyond the basic things mentioned. A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens. A knob provides a richer communication path between your brain and the device. With touchscreens, you can basically just poke and swipe, with some unintuitive nuances like long press or multi-fingered gestures. With a knob, you're using separate muscles and so can associate muscle memory based on the size, texture, and granularity of "click" feedback as you turn. We also have the ability to finely modulate the rate of twisting something—compare that to tapping frantically on a touchscreen left/right icon to control a quantity. Knobs don't share space in our muscle memory with buttons. To some extent, different knobs and different buttons are distinguishable too. Physical sliders are good for fine-grained control, but are also good at just smashing them all the way to min or max. When I try that on a touchscreen control, it might not make it all the way to the extreme, or my angle is wrong (no physical constraint to keep my hand/finger in place!) and it doesn't register at all because I veered off of the control. Even when I'm looking at the screen already, using a directional pad means I'll always gradually get further and further off until it stops registering. Either because my attention is on a different part of the screen, or because my fingers are in the way of seeing the displayed pad. Not a problem with a physical stick or knob.

justsomehnguy 4y ago
Oh, it is actually worse. The amount of times when I swiped down from the top (to open the notification shade or whatever it is called now or to refresh the page), the UI shows pulling down the thing fully... and when backs off. I repeat the gesture, but again it goes all the way down and retracts back and nothing happens. And of course when I don't need that, I just swipe down to go top of the page - it thinks what I actually want to refresh the page. Many comments were lost that way.
- allenu 4y ago
  Or worse, those UI affordances may change over time. With the swipe down behavior you mentioned, on iOS, I used to just swipe down from the center of the top of the iPad to see the notification shade. A recent iOS behavior made it so swiping down from the center now causes the app window to be dragged. Ugh! Now I have to relearn to find a spot slightly to the right to pull down to view the shade.
kingrazor 4y ago
I can't count how often my left or down swipe has been interpreted as a left or right swipe on touchscreens
joe_the_user 4y ago
I agree with you but in response to: A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens. I gotta mention that I have a circa 2000 Japanese luxury car and the dials that control the stereo and the air conditioning are actually remarkably unpredictable. Turning the knob at all quickly will disorient the system and you can have a large increase in value or no-increase-at all (it seems to be an artifact of the knob changing a digital value). If you look carefully and move slowly they work but they essentially have all the drawbacks you describe with a touch screen - except you can't do something else entirely, thankfully. Obviously, better design would fix this so one does have to say "properly designed knobs are better".
- sfink 4y ago
  I agree! I could rant endlessly about all the bad physical interfaces I've used. My house is full of them. All the new appliances come with the flat buttons—are they capacitive or something?—they may or may not register when you press them, that often don't work when poked with a gloved elbow, etc. And dials like you describe that change random amounts or aren't debounced or whatever. There are probably more possible ways for physical things to go wrong than the small but common set of problems with touchscreens. It's more that they can go more right, too. (Or at least have their problems and benefits better matched to a task.)
  - porknubbins 4y ago
    Now that you mention it all applicances I’ve ever seen have those annoying flat buttons. If they made a microwave or oven control panel with the equivalent of a satisfying mechanical keyboard it would pretty well differentiate itself with a premium feel, though even the feel of a decent tv remote would be a huge improvement.
    - psd1 4y ago
      My microwave has four interface elements: - rotary knob for function (microwave power level, defrost mode, some never-used oven modes) - rotary knob for time; this turns itself back towards zero as it unwinds - audible "ting" when timer elapses - physical press button for the door latch I can heat food with a single turn of the timer knob. Most microwaves require you to navigate. You can fuck off with that shit, not in my house.
aimor 4y ago
I remember when my phone updated to Android 10 and soon after I received a call and, well, there's a video that shows pretty much exactly how things went: https://youtu.be/UzpEHwZ-s-M?t=9 https://youtu.be/UzpEHwZ-s-M?t=9 I can't believe we're asking software developers to recreate the world on a screen. It's an incredible amount of work that never gets done, leaving us with unintuitive interfaces.
tomtung 4y ago
So true. This is one reason why I really miss my Pebble watch with its physical buttons, which allowed me to perform a lot of operations by touch without looking (e.g., play/pause/forward/rewind for media control). In comparison, fiddling with the small touch screen of my Fitbit Versa is such a poor user experience. Not to mention Pebble's "low-tech" screen was so clearly visible in direct sunlight, while I have problem clearly seeing the fancier screen of Fitbit when it's slightly bright outside.
- mjcohen 4y ago
  Pebble Times (and others) are still available on eBay. I am wearing my third - the batteries died on my other two.
WalterBright 4y ago
I find it harder to accurately position a physical slider than a knob. The reason is pretty obvious once you realize which muscles are involved in each movement.
- ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
  Well, it depends on the length/circumference. Knobs are usually more satisfying to tune, but faders are not only as precise, but give better visual feedback and you can move multiple at once.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Oh, sliders do provide better visual feedback. But they are less imprecise because your gross motor muscles move your arm to move the slider, whereas a typical knob uses the fine control muscles in your hand.
_yb2s 4y ago
Your post is really reassuring... I have all of these problems with touchscreens and find them almost unusable... yet I thought I was alone, because people seem to love them.
- picture 4y ago
  I think it goes to show how people are surprisingly willing to settle for sub par experiences. Nearly everyone in the united states use terrible paper mate pens that scratch and skip, and use composition notebooks with cover that looks like tv static, made of center-stapled tissue paper that don't open flat. (If any of you are suffering from terrible stationary, I would recommend trying out Midori MD Paper notebooks or Rhodia Rhodiarama notebooks. Midori makes beautiful and functional notebooks with precision ruling that satisfies the engineer in me, and Rhodia uses luxurious Clairefontaine paper suitable for fountain pens and stuff)
stjohnswarts 4y ago
One reason I'm hanging on to my car for now. I prefer knobs and buttons. I can adjust my radio, ac, heat, defrost, etc without ever taking my eyes off the road.
yourapostasy 4y ago
I expect if lo-tek UI’s become a popular way to interface with software, it won’t be long before someone is codgering up a 3D printer to create baroque monstrosities. Like say a colicky knob that acts as a button in both push and pull directions with multiple different clicky depths, and slides. That reminds me of many Asian web site UI’s: they’re very dense by some Western market standards because many Asian markets’ Internet users apparently want dense information transfer in their user experience, which seems to be eschewed by many current Western site designs.
daniel-cussen 4y ago
> A knob provides a richer communication path between your brain and the device. With touchscreens, you can basically just poke and swipe, with some unintuitive nuances like long press or multi-fingered gestures. With a knob, you're using separate muscles and so can associate muscle memory based on the size, texture, and granularity of "click" feedback as you turn. We also have the ability to finely modulate the rate of twisting something—compare that to tapping frantically on a touchscreen left/right icon to control a quantity. That gives me an idea, which I credit to you sfink. To make a product with knobs, buy knobs of slightly different makes with variations that feel slightly different, slightly different texture, different roughness, different give, despite being all of them supposedly the same jelly bean part. This helps muscle memory because despite appearing basically the same the muscles and spine know the difference right away, secretly. What that means is for a 6-knob device you need 6 suppliers. What that means is there's room in the market for many companies, and less economies of scale, despite being formally a commodity. What that then means is there's more diversity in the marketplace, and more companies that can each stay afloat, competition is less cutthroat. The other thing that then means is American and Chinese companies can coexist in what is otherwise a bitter-fought market. In fact, one good way of getting subtly different knob feels is in fact making them in different countries with different regulatory environments dictating how not to make the knob. And what that all means is we reduce the final stage of economies of scale--wars and empires.
DarylZero 4y ago
All very good points. I'd like to add that several of the advantages you list also apply to the old-school mouse vs. the touchscreen & touchpad.
Affric 4y ago
Right? Modern computers, GUIs, and even the TUI, provide flexibility for a device. They're good at manipulating many different types of information. If you have something that is meant to do something very well and it is critical then it makes sense to have a machine with purpose built physical controls. Controls which enable you to manipulate that one critical type of information accurately and easily. The dedicated machine with physical controls will have to be correct, complete, and durable. But it will always work better because the controls are designed for real human bodily movement. They become truly enmeshed in muscle memory. You know where a control is relative to the others. It's just different.

by sfink 4y ago

justsomehnguy 4y ago

Oh, it is actually worse. The amount of times when I swiped down from the top (to open the notification shade or whatever it is called now or to refresh the page), the UI shows pulling down the thing fully... and when backs off. I repeat the gesture, but again it goes all the way down and retracts back and nothing happens. And of course when I don't need that, I just swipe down to go top of the page - it thinks what I actually want to refresh the page. Many comments were lost that way.

allenu 4y ago
Or worse, those UI affordances may change over time. With the swipe down behavior you mentioned, on iOS, I used to just swipe down from the center of the top of the iPad to see the notification shade. A recent iOS behavior made it so swiping down from the center now causes the app window to be dragged. Ugh! Now I have to relearn to find a spot slightly to the right to pull down to view the shade.

kingrazor 4y ago

I can't count how often my left or down swipe has been interpreted as a left or right swipe on touchscreens

joe_the_user 4y ago

I agree with you but in response to: A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens. I gotta mention that I have a circa 2000 Japanese luxury car and the dials that control the stereo and the air conditioning are actually remarkably unpredictable. Turning the knob at all quickly will disorient the system and you can have a large increase in value or no-increase-at all (it seems to be an artifact of the knob changing a digital value). If you look carefully and move slowly they work but they essentially have all the drawbacks you describe with a touch screen - except you can't do something else entirely, thankfully. Obviously, better design would fix this so one does have to say "properly designed knobs are better".

sfink 4y ago
I agree! I could rant endlessly about all the bad physical interfaces I've used. My house is full of them. All the new appliances come with the flat buttons—are they capacitive or something?—they may or may not register when you press them, that often don't work when poked with a gloved elbow, etc. And dials like you describe that change random amounts or aren't debounced or whatever. There are probably more possible ways for physical things to go wrong than the small but common set of problems with touchscreens. It's more that they can go more right, too. (Or at least have their problems and benefits better matched to a task.)
- porknubbins 4y ago
  Now that you mention it all applicances I’ve ever seen have those annoying flat buttons. If they made a microwave or oven control panel with the equivalent of a satisfying mechanical keyboard it would pretty well differentiate itself with a premium feel, though even the feel of a decent tv remote would be a huge improvement.
  - psd1 4y ago
    My microwave has four interface elements: - rotary knob for function (microwave power level, defrost mode, some never-used oven modes) - rotary knob for time; this turns itself back towards zero as it unwinds - audible "ting" when timer elapses - physical press button for the door latch I can heat food with a single turn of the timer knob. Most microwaves require you to navigate. You can fuck off with that shit, not in my house.

aimor 4y ago

I remember when my phone updated to Android 10 and soon after I received a call and, well, there's a video that shows pretty much exactly how things went: https://youtu.be/UzpEHwZ-s-M?t=9 https://youtu.be/UzpEHwZ-s-M?t=9 I can't believe we're asking software developers to recreate the world on a screen. It's an incredible amount of work that never gets done, leaving us with unintuitive interfaces.

tomtung 4y ago

So true. This is one reason why I really miss my Pebble watch with its physical buttons, which allowed me to perform a lot of operations by touch without looking (e.g., play/pause/forward/rewind for media control). In comparison, fiddling with the small touch screen of my Fitbit Versa is such a poor user experience. Not to mention Pebble's "low-tech" screen was so clearly visible in direct sunlight, while I have problem clearly seeing the fancier screen of Fitbit when it's slightly bright outside.

mjcohen 4y ago
Pebble Times (and others) are still available on eBay. I am wearing my third - the batteries died on my other two.

WalterBright 4y ago

I find it harder to accurately position a physical slider than a knob. The reason is pretty obvious once you realize which muscles are involved in each movement.

ZoomZoomZoom 4y ago
Well, it depends on the length/circumference. Knobs are usually more satisfying to tune, but faders are not only as precise, but give better visual feedback and you can move multiple at once.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Oh, sliders do provide better visual feedback. But they are less imprecise because your gross motor muscles move your arm to move the slider, whereas a typical knob uses the fine control muscles in your hand.

_yb2s 4y ago

Your post is really reassuring... I have all of these problems with touchscreens and find them almost unusable... yet I thought I was alone, because people seem to love them.

picture 4y ago
I think it goes to show how people are surprisingly willing to settle for sub par experiences. Nearly everyone in the united states use terrible paper mate pens that scratch and skip, and use composition notebooks with cover that looks like tv static, made of center-stapled tissue paper that don't open flat. (If any of you are suffering from terrible stationary, I would recommend trying out Midori MD Paper notebooks or Rhodia Rhodiarama notebooks. Midori makes beautiful and functional notebooks with precision ruling that satisfies the engineer in me, and Rhodia uses luxurious Clairefontaine paper suitable for fountain pens and stuff)

stjohnswarts 4y ago

One reason I'm hanging on to my car for now. I prefer knobs and buttons. I can adjust my radio, ac, heat, defrost, etc without ever taking my eyes off the road.

yourapostasy 4y ago

I expect if lo-tek UI’s become a popular way to interface with software, it won’t be long before someone is codgering up a 3D printer to create baroque monstrosities. Like say a colicky knob that acts as a button in both push and pull directions with multiple different clicky depths, and slides. That reminds me of many Asian web site UI’s: they’re very dense by some Western market standards because many Asian markets’ Internet users apparently want dense information transfer in their user experience, which seems to be eschewed by many current Western site designs.

daniel-cussen 4y ago

> A knob provides a richer communication path between your brain and the device. With touchscreens, you can basically just poke and swipe, with some unintuitive nuances like long press or multi-fingered gestures. With a knob, you're using separate muscles and so can associate muscle memory based on the size, texture, and granularity of "click" feedback as you turn. We also have the ability to finely modulate the rate of twisting something—compare that to tapping frantically on a touchscreen left/right icon to control a quantity. That gives me an idea, which I credit to you sfink. To make a product with knobs, buy knobs of slightly different makes with variations that feel slightly different, slightly different texture, different roughness, different give, despite being all of them supposedly the same jelly bean part. This helps muscle memory because despite appearing basically the same the muscles and spine know the difference right away, secretly. What that means is for a 6-knob device you need 6 suppliers. What that means is there's room in the market for many companies, and less economies of scale, despite being formally a commodity. What that then means is there's more diversity in the marketplace, and more companies that can each stay afloat, competition is less cutthroat. The other thing that then means is American and Chinese companies can coexist in what is otherwise a bitter-fought market. In fact, one good way of getting subtly different knob feels is in fact making them in different countries with different regulatory environments dictating how not to make the knob. And what that all means is we reduce the final stage of economies of scale--wars and empires.

DarylZero 4y ago

All very good points. I'd like to add that several of the advantages you list also apply to the old-school mouse vs. the touchscreen & touchpad.

Affric 4y ago

Right? Modern computers, GUIs, and even the TUI, provide flexibility for a device. They're good at manipulating many different types of information. If you have something that is meant to do something very well and it is critical then it makes sense to have a machine with purpose built physical controls. Controls which enable you to manipulate that one critical type of information accurately and easily. The dedicated machine with physical controls will have to be correct, complete, and durable. But it will always work better because the controls are designed for real human bodily movement. They become truly enmeshed in muscle memory. You know where a control is relative to the others. It's just different.