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> The only good reason is to save money on buttons and knobs. That’s not quite right. At scale the buttons and knobs are cheap. Having designed many control
by robomartin 3y ago
> The only good reason is to save money on buttons and knobs.
That’s not quite right. At scale the buttons and knobs are cheap. Having designed many control panels for a wide range of applications, I can tell you that good design is an excruciatingly long and painfully expensive undertaking.
You cannot recompile your way out of a poorly working physical control panel or bad design. You can’t just throw something together for testing and finish it while other teams complete the design of the rest of the car, machine, etc.
As a real example, you might have to evaluate hundreds of button designs for tactile, audible and visible feel. Once sub-selected, you might evaluate over a dozen full scale control panel mock-ups before design lock. Etc.
Touch screens allow you to eliminate a huge portion of what goes into creating a user interphase.
- georgeecollins 3y agoGood to know! I always thought it was to save money.
- robomartin 3y agoWell, it does save money…just not necessarily due to hardware cost differences.
- Summershard 3y agoIt actually is. The design is just a small part of the control's cost. Then it has to go through a lot of compliance tests (the controls can't be flammable, can't break easily into shards, and so on). You have to do those tests for every car's interior part. When you squeeze everything into a touchscreen, you have to make the whole screen compliant only once.