23 ms·

Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" and probably their testing audiences responding more positively

Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" and probably their testing audiences responding more positively to images of flashy touch screens and shiny lights. Driving a car with touch screens (new BMW or Mercedes) has left me very unimpressed. My 2016 VW Golf has actual buttons, switches, and knobs to twist and turn and press and flip. Car reviewers, too, often say it's a shame that car manufacturers are switching to touch screen nonsense. It's such a shameful trend if you think about it. The BMW series of pre-2022 had buttons in the dashboard, but the upcoming new series will do away with those entirely. Touch screens even find their way onto steering wheels and doors. Of course, it's easy to understand why: 1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want. Honestly, I hope European legislation makes it illegal at some point. For the sake of safety. With touch screens, even the most simple task requires you to take your eyes off the road in front of you; with regular buttons you could do many task just with touch. What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance! So, now you need to do everything with an outstretched arm in a moving vehicle to operate tiny buttons on a flat touch screen. Oh, and the touch screen can only barely hit 60 frames per second and often feels much slower. They're even saving costs on GPU power in their fancy luxury cars.

marvinvz 4y ago
It's mainly about cost and a bit about "but Tesla!".
konschubert 4y ago
> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" and probably their testing audiences responding more positively to images of flashy touch screens and shiny lights. It's mostly a cost saving measure. Physical buttons are expensive. I you eliminate them, the car gets cheaper to make. That's all. It's a sign of low quality and I expect that in 5 to 10 years, consumers will start to realise this.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Surely the buttons don't cost that much compared to, y'know, the rest of the vehicle?
  - tokai 4y ago
    I guess its the installation. One touch screen is one process. 15 buttons require 15 operations to finish the dashboard. You have to save everywhere, else costs will run up. Small savings become huge at scale.
    - cma 4y ago
      104 key mechanical keyboards have 104 buttons and may go for $30. Maybe it is the knobs? But you can get a midi keyboard with 8 knobs, 49 keys, 12 pressure sensitive pads for ~$100 (but maybe it wouldn't last in car cabin heat).
      - greyhair 4y ago
        Those keyboards don't have the same environmental requirements. Automotive environmental is hard. Temperature extremes, high and low, plus humidity extremes. There are also reliability expectations. If I need defrost because the windshield just fogged over, it better activate when I turn that knob on my sixteen year old car. And so far, it always has.
      - hulitu 4y ago
        Can it work at -40 C or 85 C ? Can it work after it was in a salted atmosphere for 100 hours ? And then in a sandy atmosphere for 100 hours ?
        Joker_vD 4y ago
        Okay, remind me to never leave a keyboard in a front seat of a car, apparently it can't survive in there.
        4y ago
kgwgk 4y ago
The impressive thing about the touchscreens in BMWs is that you don’t need to touch them at all. [I’ve not seen the new models though. I’m sure they are not better than the ones being replaced.] https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/170098/bmw-idrive-explained-what-is-it-and-how-does-it-work https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/170098/bmw-idrive...
- amelius 4y ago
  You still have to browse through menus.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    I find the system very usable and in any case the point is that it’s not _touch_screen based.
- flakeoil 4y ago
  Isn't that a drawback. Even easier to press the wrong button. Must be terrible when driving on a bumpy road and your hand is jumping around.
  - kgwgk 4y ago
    No, it’s not easier to press the wrong button and your hand doesn’t jump around when using the controller.
  - prvit 4y ago
    Why would that be a drawback? If you can't keep your hand steady on the iDrive controller, you probably shouldn't be driving a car at all.
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    No, it's not. It's by far the best HID in any car I have driven in the last 10 years and I have driven probably 50 different rentals.
- Sakos 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
moss2 4y ago
5. The manufacturer can change functionality and user interface with a simple software update. If Toyota half-way through shipping their latest car realize it's better to have two knobs on the dashboard, they can very easily add one if the dashboard is just one big touch screen.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  In some way that's even worse though. Everything should stay put. When driving a car, all this stuff is a secondary activity. I need to be able to develop muscle memory to ideally perform these finds blind while giving my main attention to the road. Buttons help doing this without looking. I might be able to do navigate a touch screen quickly if everything is in the same place all the time. Moving things around is just another opportunity to force more attention to the secondary activity
- vincnetas 4y ago
  What this "we can change it later" option creates is designs that are not very well thought out. When you have physical buttons you must be double sure that this is the best layout that you can come up. You need to commit and double (triple) check with multiple people. Allocate resources for manufacturing/tooling. But you are forced to think about it really really hard. With touch screen and OTA updates, you can skip the hard part and leave it for future you to improve if needed. But as we all know, when it's already sold there is no motivation to spend money to improve. So touch UI stays half baked. And only gets improved with future models.
  - moss2 4y ago
    You can think about design until your hair starts falling out, but customer needs cab change at any time.
wikfwikf 4y ago
I think the trend towards touchscreens has to do with the halo effect of the iphone. The fully touchscreen phone was much more modern-feeling, and also better and easier to use than previous phones with buttons. The irony is of course that the decision to have very few buttons (not one, not zero, but very few) with almost all input via the screen was made very carefully by Apple with very specific justification based on understanding of how phones were used and could be used. This is clear from Jobs' iphone keynote. If Steve Jobs, Jony Ives etc were redesigning car interfaces it's far from obvious that they would have made similar decisions.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Physical buttons: 1. Are expensive 2. Need space on the PCB 3. Need ICT 4. Need special soldering sometimes 5. need a dedicated interrupt interface on the microcontroller ( that's why are more responsive) 6. Need software both at "kernel" (BSW) level and at userspace (application) level. A touchscreen "button" needs only a callback to a routine and a lot of patience from the user.
StevenWaterman 4y ago
There is one benefit - you can update the UI of a car with a touchscreen but not one with buttons. Tesla's first touchscreen [1] now looks slightly dated, but they're able to just update the entire fleet. No doubt it'll get to the point where you can't update it any more - either due to hardware incompatibility, lack of processing power, or some new technology being added. But it has meant that a 2013 Model S looks more modern today than it would have otherwise. Equally, tech tends to look dated much faster than physical buttons do. It's too early to really say which has more long-lasting appeal. [1] https://youtu.be/TZ0HsN-tblo?t=124 https://youtu.be/TZ0HsN-tblo?t=124
- dncornholio 4y ago
  I've never been in my car and thought the buttons could use an update.. It's hardly something that you should trade safety for.
- grishka 4y ago
  Updatability is not a good thing. I want my UIs to never change without a good reason, and there can't be a good reason to change car controls.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    The change is important during product development, though. I think touch screens are a reaction to PMs at car companies wanting to make last-minute changes, and being told "no, we already spent 10 million dollars on the injection molds". Put it in software, then your lazy engineers just have to stay late for a month. And if they don't finish in time, hey, just fake it in Photoshop for the ads and update the UI later!
    - grishka 4y ago
      I feel like the contribution of project managers to the humanity is net negative. UIs, whether on screens or as hardware controls, need to be built to suit the human body and to not require thinking to operate once one develops muscle memory. Every other concern — including aesthetics — is secondary. Touchscreens in cars are very contrary to that because they require visual feedback.
mrtksn 4y ago
The cars with a lot of buttons simply look outdated and people feel bad on choosing a car with a small screen. The whole marketing is built on it, you get a small screen and lots of buttons if you get the basic version of the car and you get giant touchscreen if you buy the premium package. If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy(at the time of purchase, most people don't have real world experience with touch screens on cars and touch screens are in these cutting edge electronics that are expensive, so they must be good). If your new car has a small screen you need to explain why this was the logical choice and how much you saved. It's even the same with the iPhone 13 mini. That device is amazing, you can use it with one hand and fits in every pocket and the screen is actually larger than the first large screen iPhone(the iPhone 6) but people will try to understand why you bought that one. Are you poor? Why would you buy a tiny phone? It's very strange, the word on the street is that the larger the screen the better. If your $30K product instantly becomes much easier to sell when you replace buttons with touchscreens without increasing the costs wouldn't you do that? I guess you need to have a niche, snobby traditionalist brand to be able to reject that demand from the consumers.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy Does this ever happen? I've never heard anyone express jealousy regarding not having a big enough touchscreen in their car. I've heard several owners of modern cars with touchscreens bemoan how complicated and slow to use they are. In my experience literally no-one who actually buys and drives cars thinks they are a good idea and many people - including myself - are deterred from buying a new model specifically because of the technology.
  - alehlopeh 4y ago
    I am jealous of people with larger touchscreens in their car.
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    It definitely happens(I know from experience). The thing is, it's actually really hard to judge quality of a design(takes a bachelor degree in Industrial Design and masters in related field and a few studies like the one in question to objectively evaluate a design). Most people like the new trendy one and unfortunately in cars that's a large touchscreen. Don't think of car enthusiast, think people who like the car because of the shade of its color and feel of the leather - which is most people.
emiliobumachar 4y ago
5. Backup cameras. They're legally required in some jurisdictions (so I heard), and genuinely contribute to safety, but they require a screen. Once the screen is there, there's both less space for buttons and a virtual hook for features.
- badwolf 4y ago
  in addition, my Volvo does a "360" view, which is pretty darn useful for parking.
  - Sander_Marechal 4y ago
    My Nissan Qashqai has it too. I absolutely love that 360 view and will never buy another car without it. It makes parking sooo much easier.
- benj111 4y ago
  You can just use the screen for infotainment and satnav though. I already have a screen showing what radio station is playing, and one on the dash telling me where to go. If a screen is required for a backup camera, just combine it. If I'm reversing I probably don't need the satnav anyway, whereas if I'm reversing or using satnav I probably do need other functions which just means you need an even bigger screen so you can fit everything on.
  - emiliobumachar 4y ago
    You're absolutely right, but my point is that the minimum number of screens is no longer zero.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Sure, but the screen need not have any touch capabilities. It doesn't need to be large either. A 2 inch screen is large enough for the camera functions.
- kylecordes 4y ago
woliveirajr 4y ago
You shouldn't use your smartphone while driving because you might cause an accident while you are looking away from the road and not using both hands to hold the sterring wheel. But that's ok with touchscreens.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  To be fair, while I agree that touchscreens are far worse for distraction than physical controls, they're far, far better than a smartphone. Phones are designed to hold your attention, have small text sizes and interface elements, require actually holding the phone vs just using the touchscreen, and a lot of distracted driving comes from wildly inappropriate activities like texting vs advancing to the next song on Spotify or something.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And the reality is that fiddling with the radio, fiddling with climate controls, looking at physical maps and written directions, etc. were all things long before touchscreens. (To say nothing of mobile phones, including before they got "smart.) Let's not pretend that distractions weren't a thing before touchscreens in cars came along.
- april_22 4y ago
  I even think the only way to drive new Teslas in reverse is by swiping a button on the touchscreen. That's such a huge security risk.
throwawaylinux 4y ago
> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" Do you have any evidence for this? Seems pretty outlandish to me. > 1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want. What does 4 even mean? If we took 1-3 as fact, then should businesses have disregarded them and instead made something more expensive to produce that looked cheaper and sold for less because people don't respond so positively?
kottapar 4y ago
> What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance! Mazda also has this beautiful dial-joystick which we can operate in a rested position. It is so intuitive that I stopped using the touchscreen console itself. On the other hand even when we operate using a dial and buttons we take our eyes for an instant to look at the screen to check the changes. Now imagine looking away at a touchscreen just to see what operation to perform etc. This is a major distraction.
- spcebar 4y ago
  BMW at one point had (and may still have) a dial joystick, but I found it really unintuitive. Maybe it was poor software design, but it was never clear to me when I needed to turn the dial vs move the stick to navigate menus. Did you find it easier to use the control in the Mazda? Was the UX better?
- ModernMech 4y ago
  Mazda has actually been going in the opposite direction by removing their touchscreens; 2016 Mazdas came with touchscreens, but the newest models go without. Personally, owning a 2016 Mazda I never actually used the touch screen once, due to as you note, the great dial interface.
greggeter 4y ago
ptsneves 4y ago
I have a 2021 BMW and I really like the alternatives on button and touch screen it offers. I barely use the touchscreen and when not needed I outright turn it off. This is quite easy because BMW has 8 buttons that can be mapped to any function in the touchscreen including turning off the main screen. Another thing I enjoy is the gesture detector. It sometimes has false positives when I gesticulate a lot but it works when I actually intend it to. It is very satisfying to mute the radio or change an annoying music with a hand gesture. If they would keep trying to integrate and perfect it I think it would be the right direction for innovation. Touchscreens are fine when parked or for the passenger. Anything else they are useless and often have too much distracting info, so they are turned off.
- WXLCKNO 4y ago
  I ordered a new 3 series (2023) which does away with those buttons and a few others. I would have preferred having at least the temperature controls as physical buttons but other than that they do have the navigation knob/joystick which is well positioned to control the system. It feels like a reasonable compromise.
  - rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    The joystick in BMW's is awesome. Gives you access to every function in the car with minimal glance at the screen needed. If you get the one with the HUD, no need to even look at the map.
    - ptsneves 4y ago
      Mine displays navigation and media information along with speedometer and street signs. It does not have all the car's info available. Was looking at [1] and even with the joystick it is less than ideal. I would need to try though. The joystick is good to navigate the screen but navigating a screen while driving is still not the way it should be. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPWWbvcs4Dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPWWbvcs4Dw
fortran77 4y ago
I think it's in poor taste that you refer to older people as "fossils"
- slothtrop 4y ago
  I would have gone for antiques.
fluidcruft 4y ago
I can see voice control being useful and far cheaper (modulo the issue of how to deal with jackass passengers, but that's pretty easily dealt with using a push-to-talk button on the steering wheel). In a previous discussion someone mentioned that part of this trend toward screens in cars is that new cars are now required to have rear-view camera. So once you are required to have the screen, it's really almost nothing to waltz over to touch screens. Of note: the "winning" car is so old it doesn't have rear-view cameras.
DrBazza 4y ago
> What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance! My MB is a UX disaster. Have a guess how many controls there are in the car for navigating the (non-touch!) screen? 1? Nope. 2? Nope. 3? Yes 3. A touch surface in the centre console, a spinning wheel in the centre console (which is also a joystick), and finally a little joystick thing on the steering wheel. Volume controllers? 2. And don't get me started on how dangerously absurd it is trying to switch between MB's own system and Apple Carplay/Google Auto whilst driving.
neilv 4y ago
> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" Is there evidence it was 60+ year-olds who decided to lean on touchscreens for cars? If that's just an assumption, isn't an equally likely ageist guess that it was pushed by people who came up through the ranks in the era of "UX"? (Since I'd expect that old-school, pre-UX human factors engineers, who grew up on research coming from aircraft cockpit optimization, safety, and UI in service of the user... would research the heck out of a new technology option like this.)
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  The parent comment could not have gotten it more wrong. It was not "60+ year old fossils" that made this decision. It was "30-40 year old disrupter hipsters" that told the older people in charge what looks immediately appealing to the average person (and not just young people, who can't afford to buy new cars).
greyhair 4y ago
My brother works in automotive engineering, it isn't 60+ driving this trend. It is the design team, which skews young, and the marketing team, which also skews young. Tesla does not skew 60+ anywhere in the company, and they introduced these oversized screen based displays years ago. So on you four bullets above: 1) True 2) I don't know, perhaps? 3) Maybe a quick 'image' audience, but are they doing usability testing? 4) Completely false. The big weight is on point #1, for two reasons. 1) Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using. Then go and see what those physical buttons cost. They are not cheap. And there are a lot of them. And both technologies have micro processors behind them, so using physical knobs and buttons doesn't save money there. 2) Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints. Designers love it. One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, and now I'll be stuck staring at an illuminated display that I hate using in any case.
- paganel 4y ago
  > One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, Another of the many reasons to decry the death os Saab as a car company. Later edit: Added link to YT video demonstrating Saab's night mode [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E
  - throwawaylinux 4y ago
    It used to be not uncommon to have instrument panel dimmer in cars.
- thesuitonym 4y ago
  >but are they doing usability testing? You know they're not. If they were, nobody would ever replace a knob with a touchscreen.
  - cosmotic 4y ago
    More likely they are doing testing but aren't measuring the right things or are performing the tests improperly. I can say with high confidence that any of today's UX folks don't understand the scientific method nor statistics.
bena 4y ago
Maybe I'm weird. I don't use the center console that much. For music, I'm either streaming or shuffling what's on my phone. And then I have the screen showing maps. If I want to put in a destination, it's usually done before I even get out of park. My steering wheel has volume controls and the environmental controls are still button based.
stinos 4y ago
With touch screens, even the most simple task requires you to take your eyes off the road in front of you; with regular buttons you could do many task just with touch. Sort of related, I have the exact same issue with portable music players while walking or cycling. Most of the time the only task I need to do is play/pause or forward/backward track. For a player with buttons it takes a small amount of attempts and after that you've learned the position of the buttons by heart and can control the device even while it's in your pocket, without needing to see it. Usually aided by some tactile feedback. Fast, convenient, and somewhat safer since we're talking traffic situations. With a touchscreen-only player that is much harder, sometimes impossible (depending on which screen you're in the controls might not be in the same place or not be there at all). Sad thing is, this was already the case like a decade ago, leaving me wondering if designers have any pride in their UX, simply don't know they're doing it wrong, willingly just focus on other things apart from usability, etc. In any case: driving a heavy vehicle at high speeds should be the last case where simple things like switching a radio station actually requires you to take your eyes of the road. That's just insane.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  Decent not-so-expensive headphones come with buttons for those functions.
- nicbou 4y ago
  They sell dedicated controls you can clip onto your clothes. You could give that a try.
deleted 4y ago
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jstummbillig 4y ago
You are missing the actual real value. It's flexibility. A modern car is software and gets updates. With a touchscreen you are least constraint by your previous assumptions and can change direction any way you like.
- hulitu 4y ago
  > You are missing the actual real value. It's flexibility. A modern car is software and gets updates. The updates are only for bug fixing.Maybe this will change with SaaS but today i never heard of any Car company which does this. And no, i don't consider Tesla a car company.
chestervonwinch 4y ago
I believe you could have made your point without the "fossil" insults.
deleted 4y ago
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tommyderami 4y ago
I think points 1-3 are valid and certainly contribute to the decision, but many manufacturers believe that the future of the interface is a mixture of voice control (environmental, cabin lighting, navigation etc) and manipulation of steering wheel controls with HUD feedback (infotainment and everything else). Failure to embrace voice interfaces and demanding a button for everything is making 'fossils' out of 20-100 year olds. Source: I work at one of the big German car manufacturers and have mostly drank the 'use voice, don't look off the road' koolaid.
dogleash 4y ago
> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils Please don’t play this game where a bad design decision was finally recognized as bad design and a scapegoat is found rather than admitting the “experts” who did it have no clothes. UX branding itself “UX” rather than any of the half dozen other names we used to use was a clear statement of “It will be different this time, I promise.” It wasn’t. The design trends we got were different, but bad interaction design is still bad interaction design.
StevePerkins 4y ago
I'm not sure how you juggle the cognitive dissonance of cramming "Testing audiences respond positively" and "Fossils decided that this is what people want" into the same explanation. I do agree with the premise that physical buttons and knobs are generally far superior to touchscreen UI's, at least for the common core basic things. However, I don't agree that it's about the boomers, or the capitalists, or any other Internet strawman forcing something onto the masses against its wishes. I think it REALLY IS a matter of test audiences and "casuals" having tastes that differ from power users and other people that think deeply about a thing. You see this in many different domains.

marvinvz 4y ago

It's mainly about cost and a bit about "but Tesla!".

konschubert 4y ago

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" and probably their testing audiences responding more positively to images of flashy touch screens and shiny lights. It's mostly a cost saving measure. Physical buttons are expensive. I you eliminate them, the car gets cheaper to make. That's all. It's a sign of low quality and I expect that in 5 to 10 years, consumers will start to realise this.

Joker_vD 4y ago
Surely the buttons don't cost that much compared to, y'know, the rest of the vehicle?
- tokai 4y ago
  I guess its the installation. One touch screen is one process. 15 buttons require 15 operations to finish the dashboard. You have to save everywhere, else costs will run up. Small savings become huge at scale.
  - cma 4y ago
    104 key mechanical keyboards have 104 buttons and may go for $30. Maybe it is the knobs? But you can get a midi keyboard with 8 knobs, 49 keys, 12 pressure sensitive pads for ~$100 (but maybe it wouldn't last in car cabin heat).
    - greyhair 4y ago
      Those keyboards don't have the same environmental requirements. Automotive environmental is hard. Temperature extremes, high and low, plus humidity extremes. There are also reliability expectations. If I need defrost because the windshield just fogged over, it better activate when I turn that knob on my sixteen year old car. And so far, it always has.
    - hulitu 4y ago
      Can it work at -40 C or 85 C ? Can it work after it was in a salted atmosphere for 100 hours ? And then in a sandy atmosphere for 100 hours ?
      - Joker_vD 4y ago
        Okay, remind me to never leave a keyboard in a front seat of a car, apparently it can't survive in there.
      - 4y ago

kgwgk 4y ago

The impressive thing about the touchscreens in BMWs is that you don’t need to touch them at all. [I’ve not seen the new models though. I’m sure they are not better than the ones being replaced.] https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/170098/bmw-idrive-explained-what-is-it-and-how-does-it-work https://www.carbuyer.co.uk/tips-and-advice/170098/bmw-idrive...

amelius 4y ago
You still have to browse through menus.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  I find the system very usable and in any case the point is that it’s not _touch_screen based.
flakeoil 4y ago
Isn't that a drawback. Even easier to press the wrong button. Must be terrible when driving on a bumpy road and your hand is jumping around.
- kgwgk 4y ago
  No, it’s not easier to press the wrong button and your hand doesn’t jump around when using the controller.
- prvit 4y ago
  Why would that be a drawback? If you can't keep your hand steady on the iDrive controller, you probably shouldn't be driving a car at all.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  No, it's not. It's by far the best HID in any car I have driven in the last 10 years and I have driven probably 50 different rentals.
Sakos 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

moss2 4y ago

5. The manufacturer can change functionality and user interface with a simple software update. If Toyota half-way through shipping their latest car realize it's better to have two knobs on the dashboard, they can very easily add one if the dashboard is just one big touch screen.

ajmurmann 4y ago
In some way that's even worse though. Everything should stay put. When driving a car, all this stuff is a secondary activity. I need to be able to develop muscle memory to ideally perform these finds blind while giving my main attention to the road. Buttons help doing this without looking. I might be able to do navigate a touch screen quickly if everything is in the same place all the time. Moving things around is just another opportunity to force more attention to the secondary activity
vincnetas 4y ago
What this "we can change it later" option creates is designs that are not very well thought out. When you have physical buttons you must be double sure that this is the best layout that you can come up. You need to commit and double (triple) check with multiple people. Allocate resources for manufacturing/tooling. But you are forced to think about it really really hard. With touch screen and OTA updates, you can skip the hard part and leave it for future you to improve if needed. But as we all know, when it's already sold there is no motivation to spend money to improve. So touch UI stays half baked. And only gets improved with future models.
- moss2 4y ago
  You can think about design until your hair starts falling out, but customer needs cab change at any time.

wikfwikf 4y ago

I think the trend towards touchscreens has to do with the halo effect of the iphone. The fully touchscreen phone was much more modern-feeling, and also better and easier to use than previous phones with buttons. The irony is of course that the decision to have very few buttons (not one, not zero, but very few) with almost all input via the screen was made very carefully by Apple with very specific justification based on understanding of how phones were used and could be used. This is clear from Jobs' iphone keynote. If Steve Jobs, Jony Ives etc were redesigning car interfaces it's far from obvious that they would have made similar decisions.

hulitu 4y ago
Physical buttons: 1. Are expensive 2. Need space on the PCB 3. Need ICT 4. Need special soldering sometimes 5. need a dedicated interrupt interface on the microcontroller ( that's why are more responsive) 6. Need software both at "kernel" (BSW) level and at userspace (application) level. A touchscreen "button" needs only a callback to a routine and a lot of patience from the user.

StevenWaterman 4y ago

There is one benefit - you can update the UI of a car with a touchscreen but not one with buttons. Tesla's first touchscreen [1] now looks slightly dated, but they're able to just update the entire fleet. No doubt it'll get to the point where you can't update it any more - either due to hardware incompatibility, lack of processing power, or some new technology being added. But it has meant that a 2013 Model S looks more modern today than it would have otherwise. Equally, tech tends to look dated much faster than physical buttons do. It's too early to really say which has more long-lasting appeal. [1] https://youtu.be/TZ0HsN-tblo?t=124 https://youtu.be/TZ0HsN-tblo?t=124

dncornholio 4y ago
I've never been in my car and thought the buttons could use an update.. It's hardly something that you should trade safety for.
grishka 4y ago
Updatability is not a good thing. I want my UIs to never change without a good reason, and there can't be a good reason to change car controls.
- jrockway 4y ago
  The change is important during product development, though. I think touch screens are a reaction to PMs at car companies wanting to make last-minute changes, and being told "no, we already spent 10 million dollars on the injection molds". Put it in software, then your lazy engineers just have to stay late for a month. And if they don't finish in time, hey, just fake it in Photoshop for the ads and update the UI later!
  - grishka 4y ago
    I feel like the contribution of project managers to the humanity is net negative. UIs, whether on screens or as hardware controls, need to be built to suit the human body and to not require thinking to operate once one develops muscle memory. Every other concern — including aesthetics — is secondary. Touchscreens in cars are very contrary to that because they require visual feedback.

mrtksn 4y ago

The cars with a lot of buttons simply look outdated and people feel bad on choosing a car with a small screen. The whole marketing is built on it, you get a small screen and lots of buttons if you get the basic version of the car and you get giant touchscreen if you buy the premium package. If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy(at the time of purchase, most people don't have real world experience with touch screens on cars and touch screens are in these cutting edge electronics that are expensive, so they must be good). If your new car has a small screen you need to explain why this was the logical choice and how much you saved. It's even the same with the iPhone 13 mini. That device is amazing, you can use it with one hand and fits in every pocket and the screen is actually larger than the first large screen iPhone(the iPhone 6) but people will try to understand why you bought that one. Are you poor? Why would you buy a tiny phone? It's very strange, the word on the street is that the larger the screen the better. If your $30K product instantly becomes much easier to sell when you replace buttons with touchscreens without increasing the costs wouldn't you do that? I guess you need to have a niche, snobby traditionalist brand to be able to reject that demand from the consumers.

Silhouette 4y ago
If your new car has a large touchscreen your friends who own 5+ y.o. car compliment your choice and express jealousy Does this ever happen? I've never heard anyone express jealousy regarding not having a big enough touchscreen in their car. I've heard several owners of modern cars with touchscreens bemoan how complicated and slow to use they are. In my experience literally no-one who actually buys and drives cars thinks they are a good idea and many people - including myself - are deterred from buying a new model specifically because of the technology.
- alehlopeh 4y ago
  I am jealous of people with larger touchscreens in their car.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  It definitely happens(I know from experience). The thing is, it's actually really hard to judge quality of a design(takes a bachelor degree in Industrial Design and masters in related field and a few studies like the one in question to objectively evaluate a design). Most people like the new trendy one and unfortunately in cars that's a large touchscreen. Don't think of car enthusiast, think people who like the car because of the shade of its color and feel of the leather - which is most people.

emiliobumachar 4y ago

5. Backup cameras. They're legally required in some jurisdictions (so I heard), and genuinely contribute to safety, but they require a screen. Once the screen is there, there's both less space for buttons and a virtual hook for features.

badwolf 4y ago
in addition, my Volvo does a "360" view, which is pretty darn useful for parking.
- Sander_Marechal 4y ago
  My Nissan Qashqai has it too. I absolutely love that 360 view and will never buy another car without it. It makes parking sooo much easier.
benj111 4y ago
You can just use the screen for infotainment and satnav though. I already have a screen showing what radio station is playing, and one on the dash telling me where to go. If a screen is required for a backup camera, just combine it. If I'm reversing I probably don't need the satnav anyway, whereas if I'm reversing or using satnav I probably do need other functions which just means you need an even bigger screen so you can fit everything on.
- emiliobumachar 4y ago
  You're absolutely right, but my point is that the minimum number of screens is no longer zero.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Sure, but the screen need not have any touch capabilities. It doesn't need to be large either. A 2 inch screen is large enough for the camera functions.
kylecordes 4y ago

woliveirajr 4y ago

You shouldn't use your smartphone while driving because you might cause an accident while you are looking away from the road and not using both hands to hold the sterring wheel. But that's ok with touchscreens.

ryanbrunner 4y ago
To be fair, while I agree that touchscreens are far worse for distraction than physical controls, they're far, far better than a smartphone. Phones are designed to hold your attention, have small text sizes and interface elements, require actually holding the phone vs just using the touchscreen, and a lot of distracted driving comes from wildly inappropriate activities like texting vs advancing to the next song on Spotify or something.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And the reality is that fiddling with the radio, fiddling with climate controls, looking at physical maps and written directions, etc. were all things long before touchscreens. (To say nothing of mobile phones, including before they got "smart.) Let's not pretend that distractions weren't a thing before touchscreens in cars came along.
april_22 4y ago
I even think the only way to drive new Teslas in reverse is by swiping a button on the touchscreen. That's such a huge security risk.

throwawaylinux 4y ago

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" Do you have any evidence for this? Seems pretty outlandish to me. > 1. It's cheaper to produce; 2. It looks more expensive, so the price goes up; 3. Testing audiences respond positively to shiny lights; 4. Fossils decided that this is what the young people want. What does 4 even mean? If we took 1-3 as fact, then should businesses have disregarded them and instead made something more expensive to produce that looked cheaper and sold for less because people don't respond so positively?

kottapar 4y ago

> What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance! Mazda also has this beautiful dial-joystick which we can operate in a rested position. It is so intuitive that I stopped using the touchscreen console itself. On the other hand even when we operate using a dial and buttons we take our eyes for an instant to look at the screen to check the changes. Now imagine looking away at a touchscreen just to see what operation to perform etc. This is a major distraction.

spcebar 4y ago
BMW at one point had (and may still have) a dial joystick, but I found it really unintuitive. Maybe it was poor software design, but it was never clear to me when I needed to turn the dial vs move the stick to navigate menus. Did you find it easier to use the control in the Mazda? Was the UX better?
ModernMech 4y ago
Mazda has actually been going in the opposite direction by removing their touchscreens; 2016 Mazdas came with touchscreens, but the newest models go without. Personally, owning a 2016 Mazda I never actually used the touch screen once, due to as you note, the great dial interface.

greggeter 4y ago

ptsneves 4y ago

I have a 2021 BMW and I really like the alternatives on button and touch screen it offers. I barely use the touchscreen and when not needed I outright turn it off. This is quite easy because BMW has 8 buttons that can be mapped to any function in the touchscreen including turning off the main screen. Another thing I enjoy is the gesture detector. It sometimes has false positives when I gesticulate a lot but it works when I actually intend it to. It is very satisfying to mute the radio or change an annoying music with a hand gesture. If they would keep trying to integrate and perfect it I think it would be the right direction for innovation. Touchscreens are fine when parked or for the passenger. Anything else they are useless and often have too much distracting info, so they are turned off.

WXLCKNO 4y ago
I ordered a new 3 series (2023) which does away with those buttons and a few others. I would have preferred having at least the temperature controls as physical buttons but other than that they do have the navigation knob/joystick which is well positioned to control the system. It feels like a reasonable compromise.
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  The joystick in BMW's is awesome. Gives you access to every function in the car with minimal glance at the screen needed. If you get the one with the HUD, no need to even look at the map.
  - ptsneves 4y ago
    Mine displays navigation and media information along with speedometer and street signs. It does not have all the car's info available. Was looking at [1] and even with the joystick it is less than ideal. I would need to try though. The joystick is good to navigate the screen but navigating a screen while driving is still not the way it should be. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPWWbvcs4Dw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPWWbvcs4Dw

fortran77 4y ago

I think it's in poor taste that you refer to older people as "fossils"

slothtrop 4y ago
I would have gone for antiques.

fluidcruft 4y ago

I can see voice control being useful and far cheaper (modulo the issue of how to deal with jackass passengers, but that's pretty easily dealt with using a push-to-talk button on the steering wheel). In a previous discussion someone mentioned that part of this trend toward screens in cars is that new cars are now required to have rear-view camera. So once you are required to have the screen, it's really almost nothing to waltz over to touch screens. Of note: the "winning" car is so old it doesn't have rear-view cameras.

DrBazza 4y ago

> What was even more surprising, to me, is that Mercedes had this amazing nice center console unit to control things with your arm in a rested position. They removed that piece of brilliance! My MB is a UX disaster. Have a guess how many controls there are in the car for navigating the (non-touch!) screen? 1? Nope. 2? Nope. 3? Yes 3. A touch surface in the centre console, a spinning wheel in the centre console (which is also a joystick), and finally a little joystick thing on the steering wheel. Volume controllers? 2. And don't get me started on how dangerously absurd it is trying to switch between MB's own system and Apple Carplay/Google Auto whilst driving.

neilv 4y ago

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils deciding "that's hip, that's what kids want!" Is there evidence it was 60+ year-olds who decided to lean on touchscreens for cars? If that's just an assumption, isn't an equally likely ageist guess that it was pushed by people who came up through the ranks in the era of "UX"? (Since I'd expect that old-school, pre-UX human factors engineers, who grew up on research coming from aircraft cockpit optimization, safety, and UI in service of the user... would research the heck out of a new technology option like this.)

TaupeRanger 4y ago
The parent comment could not have gotten it more wrong. It was not "60+ year old fossils" that made this decision. It was "30-40 year old disrupter hipsters" that told the older people in charge what looks immediately appealing to the average person (and not just young people, who can't afford to buy new cars).

greyhair 4y ago

My brother works in automotive engineering, it isn't 60+ driving this trend. It is the design team, which skews young, and the marketing team, which also skews young. Tesla does not skew 60+ anywhere in the company, and they introduced these oversized screen based displays years ago. So on you four bullets above: 1) True 2) I don't know, perhaps? 3) Maybe a quick 'image' audience, but are they doing usability testing? 4) Completely false. The big weight is on point #1, for two reasons. 1) Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using. Then go and see what those physical buttons cost. They are not cheap. And there are a lot of them. And both technologies have micro processors behind them, so using physical knobs and buttons doesn't save money there. 2) Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints. Designers love it. One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, and now I'll be stuck staring at an illuminated display that I hate using in any case.

paganel 4y ago
> One of the things I hate the most, is that I want a mostly dark interior when I drive at night, Another of the many reasons to decry the death os Saab as a car company. Later edit: Added link to YT video demonstrating Saab's night mode [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgh2zbifn7E
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
  It used to be not uncommon to have instrument panel dimmer in cars.
thesuitonym 4y ago
>but are they doing usability testing? You know they're not. If they were, nobody would ever replace a knob with a touchscreen.
- cosmotic 4y ago
  More likely they are doing testing but aren't measuring the right things or are performing the tests improperly. I can say with high confidence that any of today's UX folks don't understand the scientific method nor statistics.

bena 4y ago

Maybe I'm weird. I don't use the center console that much. For music, I'm either streaming or shuffling what's on my phone. And then I have the screen showing maps. If I want to put in a destination, it's usually done before I even get out of park. My steering wheel has volume controls and the environmental controls are still button based.

stinos 4y ago

With touch screens, even the most simple task requires you to take your eyes off the road in front of you; with regular buttons you could do many task just with touch. Sort of related, I have the exact same issue with portable music players while walking or cycling. Most of the time the only task I need to do is play/pause or forward/backward track. For a player with buttons it takes a small amount of attempts and after that you've learned the position of the buttons by heart and can control the device even while it's in your pocket, without needing to see it. Usually aided by some tactile feedback. Fast, convenient, and somewhat safer since we're talking traffic situations. With a touchscreen-only player that is much harder, sometimes impossible (depending on which screen you're in the controls might not be in the same place or not be there at all). Sad thing is, this was already the case like a decade ago, leaving me wondering if designers have any pride in their UX, simply don't know they're doing it wrong, willingly just focus on other things apart from usability, etc. In any case: driving a heavy vehicle at high speeds should be the last case where simple things like switching a radio station actually requires you to take your eyes of the road. That's just insane.

rad_gruchalski 4y ago
Decent not-so-expensive headphones come with buttons for those functions.
nicbou 4y ago
They sell dedicated controls you can clip onto your clothes. You could give that a try.

deleted 4y ago

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jstummbillig 4y ago

You are missing the actual real value. It's flexibility. A modern car is software and gets updates. With a touchscreen you are least constraint by your previous assumptions and can change direction any way you like.

hulitu 4y ago
> You are missing the actual real value. It's flexibility. A modern car is software and gets updates. The updates are only for bug fixing.Maybe this will change with SaaS but today i never heard of any Car company which does this. And no, i don't consider Tesla a car company.

chestervonwinch 4y ago

I believe you could have made your point without the "fossil" insults.

deleted 4y ago

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tommyderami 4y ago

I think points 1-3 are valid and certainly contribute to the decision, but many manufacturers believe that the future of the interface is a mixture of voice control (environmental, cabin lighting, navigation etc) and manipulation of steering wheel controls with HUD feedback (infotainment and everything else). Failure to embrace voice interfaces and demanding a button for everything is making 'fossils' out of 20-100 year olds. Source: I work at one of the big German car manufacturers and have mostly drank the 'use voice, don't look off the road' koolaid.

dogleash 4y ago

> Touch screens are just their 60+ year old fossils Please don’t play this game where a bad design decision was finally recognized as bad design and a scapegoat is found rather than admitting the “experts” who did it have no clothes. UX branding itself “UX” rather than any of the half dozen other names we used to use was a clear statement of “It will be different this time, I promise.” It wasn’t. The design trends we got were different, but bad interaction design is still bad interaction design.

StevePerkins 4y ago

I'm not sure how you juggle the cognitive dissonance of cramming "Testing audiences respond positively" and "Fossils decided that this is what people want" into the same explanation. I do agree with the premise that physical buttons and knobs are generally far superior to touchscreen UI's, at least for the common core basic things. However, I don't agree that it's about the boomers, or the capitalists, or any other Internet strawman forcing something onto the masses against its wishes. I think it REALLY IS a matter of test audiences and "casuals" having tastes that differ from power users and other people that think deeply about a thing. You see this in many different domains.