8 ms·

Older adults disproportionately hindered by touch screen interfaces (2023)

hindsightbias 2y ago
NHSTA must not have much of a human factors / UX group. Given the vast disparity of driving experiences in rented cars there must not be much in the way of regulation either. Big government indeed.
- jayd16 2y ago
  If there's a failure here, then the private sector also failed, you know.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  People misunderstand what NHTSA actually does. The core of NHTSA's job is to manage FMVSS (what makes a vehicle legal) and investigate safety issues in production vehicles. They don't approve vehicles in any way that matters here, and they avoid telling manufacturers how to do things properly. They also don't meaningfully regulate software or system usability. Those are left up to industry norms and "market forces" until deficiencies are so severe that there's significant evidence for a safety risk in production vehicles.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    They must have some research going into touchscreen enhanced distracted driving. But I guess they must not have gathered enough data pointing that way, or something?
    - evanjrowley 2y ago
      I was at NHTSA a decade ago. They were in talks to acquire a petabyte-size collection of videos of drivers' faces to study distraction, but there was no funding for a system that could hold it, so it never happened. Unsure of what happened with that initiative, but I hope it gets revived. Today there are many great options for efficiently analyzing video. Storage is also cheaper. Side Note: Last night I was driving home behind a guy whose phone was mounted to his dashboard and was playing some video on YouTube. While maneuvering to pass by him, I could clearly see his eyes locked on the phone screen instead of the road. At least with Android, maybe Google could create a safety feature that prevents both Maps and YouTube from running simultaneously.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        Predictable objection: what if I'm a passenger and want to watch YouTube but the driver doesn't have a phone so we need to use Maps also.
iwanttocomment 2y ago
This seems to be an real and important problem with capacitive touch screens. My elderly mother is often unable to make a touch register on recent Apple devices when a touch appears to have clearly happened and with reasonable force. She blames it on her fingers being "numb" but there genuinely seems to be a problem unrelated to her actions. (I've used the devices in question, and they appear to be fine. This is not an issue where she is not touching the device with her skin or a situation where the device is dirty.)
- lukan 2y ago
  It was a topic here on HN before. Consensus was, it has to do with the moisture of the skin. Older people have drier skin, so worse touchscreen response.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    Late 50s in age. I notice it occasionally. I don't think my skin is particularly dry, but don't know where the threshold is on these devices.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    I worked for a company that used a touchscreen, with a user population that skewed older. We thought it was poor circulation, not just dry skin.
    - lukan 2y ago
      Blood circulation? That might be the reason for less moisture, but the physical reason for the sensor not registering would be rather a lack of moisture (so no current), I believe.
  - y1n0 2y ago
    Early 50s. I believe it to be a combination of dryer skin, poorer circulation, and calloused fingertips. It’s incredibly frustrating. I didn’t really have a problem until this year.
- 2y ago
somanyphotons 2y ago
2026: Car makers include a moist page-turning-sponge on dashboard cluster
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I know most people just buy what is available but I hope there's continued pushback on touch screens in cars. They're terrible.
  - babypuncher 2y ago
    I think touchscreens are great in cars as long as they aren't used to replace physical controls. I bought a new Ford Maverick last year and it follows this guidance well. I can still do all the important stuff like skip tracks, tune the radio, change volume, all from both the steering wheel and a cluster of physical knobs and buttons below the touchscreen. The touchscreen is useful for less common and more intricate tasks like GPS navigation.
    - dredmorbius 2y ago
      Airplane cockpits and avionics are an interesting case where complex inputs are required and, to a very great extent, touchscreens are not used but rather both physical controls and where multiple options are necessary, physical keyboards. (There are instances of aviation-certified touchscreens, see "Thales integrated touchscreen becomes the world's first product of its kind to gain EASA certification" <https://onboard.thalesgroup.com/thales-integrated-touchscreen-becomes-the-worlds-first-product-of-its-kind-to-gain-easa-certification/ https://onboard.thalesgroup.com/thales-integrated-touchscree...> (2019), used in the Airbus A350, also "FAA Approves Commercial Touch Screen Display" <https://aviationweek.com/business-aviation/faa-approves-commercial-touch-screen-display https://aviationweek.com/business-aviation/faa-approves-comm...> (2015), for the Beechcraft King Air.) One might think that auto manufacturers could learn from this. And, mind, I'm of the opinion that if you have to type to control your automobile then someone designed that automobile incorrectly.
      - 2y ago
bloopernova 2y ago
Also those damnable single button interfaces to earbuds, vapes, etc. Older people can have trouble double clicking, it's even more difficult for them to "click 5 times rapidly", and to remember exactly where they are in a UI that has almost no outputs. Hopefully as Gen-X ages, we'll see more thought put into this problem.
- conradev 2y ago
  The iPhone has settings for physical button click speed for this reason. It's not just the elderly, but really any sort of motor difficulty. It takes a lot of force!
- margalabargala 2y ago
  Not defending the interfaces here, they do suck, but the elderly definitely aren't the target market for vapes. It's not unsurprising that they're not designed with them in mind.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    I believe taking vape off the table leaves the parent's assertion unchallenged. I've never vaped and I run into complex button schemes regularly.
  - bloopernova 2y ago
    I know a couple of older people who smoke marijuana for pain/relaxation. You are correct though, they're not the target market. I would like to see some of the more modern conveniences redesigned though. Perhaps I can win the lottery and start a business for that need. Kind of like the bras and shirts with magnetic clasps for people with limited mobility.
lapcat 2y ago
My newer car has a touch screen for the radio channels, and I experience frequent difficulty changing the channels. This becomes impossible when I'm wearing gloves, which of course is often in a Midwest winter.
- kps 2y ago
  I keep a cheap stylus in the car in winter.
- floxy 2y ago
  Sounds like we need to update the meme. Designed by young engineers in California for use by young engineers in California.
- reginald78 2y ago
  A guy I work with had some Dodge compact car and he said the touchscreen wouldn't even function (as in no video) until the car warmed up.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > he said the touchscreen wouldn't even function (as in no video) until the car warmed up. In 1980, imagine a model that had inoperable controls until the engine warmed up. Owners would hammer their dealership until it was resolved. My take is that buyers are more timid when confronted by excess tech - and less likely to hold carmakers/dealers accountable for a crap product. I think that would feel like meth to an CEO.
BeetleB 2y ago
n=17 (7 older adults). Fairly useless, IMO. Having said that, I believe it's been very well documented that touch screens in cars are less usable than the button equivalents, and likely affect driving safety. The only new thing in this study is that it's just worse for older people. (Not that younger people are not impacted).
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
We should NOT have touch screen interfaces in cars. Full stop. If the driver has to divert their gaze from the road to operate e.g. the heating/AC[0], that is a failure of UX sufficiently egregious to keep the car off the road. It is not a toy, it is not a fashion statement, it is a thousand pound chunk of steel that will indiscriminately kill and maim if not operated with care and diligence. [0] This is the complaint I have with my wife's Honda Civic. If I want to do something as simple as turn on the fan but turn off the AC, it means navigating into a sub menu and correctly hitting one of several choices on a touch screen.
- aurareturn 2y ago
  I wonder if Gen Alpha will prefer pure touchscreen controls in cars.
  - dageshi 2y ago
    The youngest in gen alpha are just being born, there's a real chance they may not learn to drive at all because self driving is ubiquitous.
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > there's a real chance they may not learn to drive at all because self driving is ubiquitous. I don't see unattended self-driving becoming the norm during the next 20 years. I'm skeptical it'll happen in 50 years. There are an uncountable number of non-foreseeable driving events and road conditions. I believe we'd have to rethink/redesign roads to adjust to limitations of FSD. Past that: A top reason for late teens not driving now is parents can't afford car insurance rates that approach their housing costs.
  - VyseofArcadia 2y ago
    Preference is irrelevant. It's demonstrably dangerous. Maybe Gen Alpha will also prefer cars without functioning headlights, but those are thankfully banned.
- 2y ago
legitster 2y ago
One thing to add to this, it's amazing that in 2025 voice assistants still suck so badly. You'd think this is a problem AI could finally nip in the bud. But even giving my phone the dumbest of instructions will result in an agonizing back and forth where it doesn't hear me quite right and constantly has to repeat back things. Heaven forbid you ask the phone to do anything useful like change a setting or pull up directions for you. You will be unceremoniously dumped out of the conversation and into some sort of hellish afterthought experience.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  "Pull up directions" is something I feel my phone is extremely good at. What phone are you using?
  - bcrl 2y ago
    It downright sucks when the local pronunciation isn't accepted by Siri. In Ottawa we pronounce St. Laurent Boulevard as the French do - "cent lorann", yet Siri only accepts the sourthern style American pronunciation of "saynt lawrence". This happens for a whole lot of place names in eastern Ontario given the bilingual nature of the national capital region. Localization is not a solved problem.
- cogogo 2y ago
  I ski a lot and wear headphones for music and to take any emergency calls. I use siri to ask “What time is it?” 50:50 whether or not it works. This has been my experience for as long as siri has existed and I have kept up to date on hw and sw. I only stick with it because pulling the phone out in the cold is even more annoying than having to repeat the long press and myself. Don’t get me started on a question that simple needing an internet connection… because I’m excluding that error case.
- bcrl 2y ago
  Siri was better in the past while driving, and actually helpful at times. Nowadays it demands that I unlock my phone. My mistake? My car doesn't have Car Play. I drove a rental last week and Car Play was far more cooperative. Sadly, it appears that I am being punished because I don't happen to be able to replace my car as often as I upgrade my phone.
nanomonkey 2y ago
Most of my current wants from devices, and mobile computing, overlap quite nicely with what aging communities need from their devices. Sunlight readable displays, buttons that are distinguishable by feeling alone (ever seen the button variety in the cockpit of jet fighters!!!), and the ability to customize outputs in a sane manner that isn't full of twelve layer deep menus of vague options that change with each software update.
- withinboredom 2y ago
  My son thinks it is magic that I can reach into my bag and pull out exactly what I want without looking. He didn't exactly grow up on touch screens, but I think about how much more tactile my life was as a child compared to his. It is night and day.
TZubiri 2y ago
"had to press a touch screen button to get information while driving" I think that putting touch screens and foregoing physical feedback is the issue, and not old people.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jedberg 2y ago
Older people have dryer hands. My mother in law has trouble with her phone all the time because of this. A vaguely related story: I had to get my fingerprints taken to volunteer at my kids school. They use a touchscreen device to take the fingerprints, and it kept failing. Mind you I was only about 44 at the time, so not exactly elderly. The teenager working the counter says to me, "Oh yeah, that happens to old people a lot, you'll just have keep trying". The sting of calling me old was real. She gave me some hand lotion and after about three more tries it finally read my prints.
joezydeco 2y ago
I'm an older adult that's worked on touch interfaces and whatnot. I don't blame the touch mechanism as much as I blame all the UX designers that adopted Material design schemas and their descendents. Bad layouts, unreadable fonts, horrible color schemes and literally NO contrast between type and background. It's apparent that none of this was tested on older users. Apple is just as guilty of this. If you switch your iPhone into high contrast mode with thicker font weights it helps, but it wasn't necessary back in the early days of iOS.
- bcrl 2y ago
  Gnome with Enlightenment back in 1999 had configurable window decorations. If you wanted a border around a window that was a few pixels wider and easier to land a mouse on, you could do that. Naturally all of that functionality was thrown out when the Gnome project did a total rewrite that was "going to make everything better" and "fix all of the problems" they ran into in the first version.
mkagenius 2y ago
This is not limited to just cars, lower to mid range mobile phones have touch sensors to unlock phones - they also struggle with dry old skins. The smart watches also struggle when used for measuring ECG or blood pressure. That is just one aspect - older people are most hindered by the UI design in my opinion, the buttons below the fold and not obvious coz they are not visible and when they are filling some form, they just don't know what to do after filling couple of boxes. That's just one example. The recent development in vision LLMs show decent promise and I think we might have to augment touch with voice controls even for handled phones. Old people won't know where the setting to turn off usb debugging is but a LLM knows and can also see things and understand, it should be able to help them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
postepowanieadm 2y ago
I really like my Mazda's UI: touchpad is disabled while driving, everything is accessible by joystick/dial. I only wish they would use hal effect joystick, less scratchy one.
WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
I believe part of the issue is lawmakers are still dazzled by tech and they over-assume it can improve things. I think that's why we 1) have questionable, federal mandates for automatic breaking and 2) have feds who can't seem to associate distracted driver incidents with in-dash screens. For the latter, preexisting bias against phones kills motivation to seek actual causes.
chaoticmass 2y ago
I have slight nerve issues that make precise double tap gestures difficult. One of the reasons I switched to an iPhone is the accessibility features are quite good and let me work around the issues I have more easily. Given how many older people I see who have the same issue I have but worse, I can imagine this is a very common problem for a lot of people.
thefz 2y ago
Still using my FiiO X3 dearly instead of the phone for music. Why? It has six buttons I can recognise by touch, I don't even have to look at it to change song or navigate its menus.
Jackosas 2y ago
[dead]

NHSTA must not have much of a human factors / UX group. Given the vast disparity of driving experiences in rented cars there must not be much in the way of regulation either. Big government indeed.

jayd16 2y ago
If there's a failure here, then the private sector also failed, you know.
AlotOfReading 2y ago
People misunderstand what NHTSA actually does. The core of NHTSA's job is to manage FMVSS (what makes a vehicle legal) and investigate safety issues in production vehicles. They don't approve vehicles in any way that matters here, and they avoid telling manufacturers how to do things properly. They also don't meaningfully regulate software or system usability. Those are left up to industry norms and "market forces" until deficiencies are so severe that there's significant evidence for a safety risk in production vehicles.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  They must have some research going into touchscreen enhanced distracted driving. But I guess they must not have gathered enough data pointing that way, or something?
  - evanjrowley 2y ago
    I was at NHTSA a decade ago. They were in talks to acquire a petabyte-size collection of videos of drivers' faces to study distraction, but there was no funding for a system that could hold it, so it never happened. Unsure of what happened with that initiative, but I hope it gets revived. Today there are many great options for efficiently analyzing video. Storage is also cheaper. Side Note: Last night I was driving home behind a guy whose phone was mounted to his dashboard and was playing some video on YouTube. While maneuvering to pass by him, I could clearly see his eyes locked on the phone screen instead of the road. At least with Android, maybe Google could create a safety feature that prevents both Maps and YouTube from running simultaneously.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Predictable objection: what if I'm a passenger and want to watch YouTube but the driver doesn't have a phone so we need to use Maps also.

iwanttocomment 2y ago

This seems to be an real and important problem with capacitive touch screens. My elderly mother is often unable to make a touch register on recent Apple devices when a touch appears to have clearly happened and with reasonable force. She blames it on her fingers being "numb" but there genuinely seems to be a problem unrelated to her actions. (I've used the devices in question, and they appear to be fine. This is not an issue where she is not touching the device with her skin or a situation where the device is dirty.)

lukan 2y ago
It was a topic here on HN before. Consensus was, it has to do with the moisture of the skin. Older people have drier skin, so worse touchscreen response.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Late 50s in age. I notice it occasionally. I don't think my skin is particularly dry, but don't know where the threshold is on these devices.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  I worked for a company that used a touchscreen, with a user population that skewed older. We thought it was poor circulation, not just dry skin.
  - lukan 2y ago
    Blood circulation? That might be the reason for less moisture, but the physical reason for the sensor not registering would be rather a lack of moisture (so no current), I believe.
- y1n0 2y ago
  Early 50s. I believe it to be a combination of dryer skin, poorer circulation, and calloused fingertips. It’s incredibly frustrating. I didn’t really have a problem until this year.
2y ago

somanyphotons 2y ago

2026: Car makers include a moist page-turning-sponge on dashboard cluster

SoftTalker 2y ago
I know most people just buy what is available but I hope there's continued pushback on touch screens in cars. They're terrible.
- babypuncher 2y ago
  I think touchscreens are great in cars as long as they aren't used to replace physical controls. I bought a new Ford Maverick last year and it follows this guidance well. I can still do all the important stuff like skip tracks, tune the radio, change volume, all from both the steering wheel and a cluster of physical knobs and buttons below the touchscreen. The touchscreen is useful for less common and more intricate tasks like GPS navigation.
  - dredmorbius 2y ago
    Airplane cockpits and avionics are an interesting case where complex inputs are required and, to a very great extent, touchscreens are not used but rather both physical controls and where multiple options are necessary, physical keyboards. (There are instances of aviation-certified touchscreens, see "Thales integrated touchscreen becomes the world's first product of its kind to gain EASA certification" <https://onboard.thalesgroup.com/thales-integrated-touchscreen-becomes-the-worlds-first-product-of-its-kind-to-gain-easa-certification/ https://onboard.thalesgroup.com/thales-integrated-touchscree...> (2019), used in the Airbus A350, also "FAA Approves Commercial Touch Screen Display" <https://aviationweek.com/business-aviation/faa-approves-commercial-touch-screen-display https://aviationweek.com/business-aviation/faa-approves-comm...> (2015), for the Beechcraft King Air.) One might think that auto manufacturers could learn from this. And, mind, I'm of the opinion that if you have to type to control your automobile then someone designed that automobile incorrectly.
    - 2y ago

bloopernova 2y ago

Also those damnable single button interfaces to earbuds, vapes, etc. Older people can have trouble double clicking, it's even more difficult for them to "click 5 times rapidly", and to remember exactly where they are in a UI that has almost no outputs. Hopefully as Gen-X ages, we'll see more thought put into this problem.

conradev 2y ago
The iPhone has settings for physical button click speed for this reason. It's not just the elderly, but really any sort of motor difficulty. It takes a lot of force!
margalabargala 2y ago
Not defending the interfaces here, they do suck, but the elderly definitely aren't the target market for vapes. It's not unsurprising that they're not designed with them in mind.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  I believe taking vape off the table leaves the parent's assertion unchallenged. I've never vaped and I run into complex button schemes regularly.
- bloopernova 2y ago
  I know a couple of older people who smoke marijuana for pain/relaxation. You are correct though, they're not the target market. I would like to see some of the more modern conveniences redesigned though. Perhaps I can win the lottery and start a business for that need. Kind of like the bras and shirts with magnetic clasps for people with limited mobility.

lapcat 2y ago

My newer car has a touch screen for the radio channels, and I experience frequent difficulty changing the channels. This becomes impossible when I'm wearing gloves, which of course is often in a Midwest winter.

kps 2y ago
I keep a cheap stylus in the car in winter.
floxy 2y ago
Sounds like we need to update the meme. Designed by young engineers in California for use by young engineers in California.
reginald78 2y ago
A guy I work with had some Dodge compact car and he said the touchscreen wouldn't even function (as in no video) until the car warmed up.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
  > he said the touchscreen wouldn't even function (as in no video) until the car warmed up. In 1980, imagine a model that had inoperable controls until the engine warmed up. Owners would hammer their dealership until it was resolved. My take is that buyers are more timid when confronted by excess tech - and less likely to hold carmakers/dealers accountable for a crap product. I think that would feel like meth to an CEO.

BeetleB 2y ago

n=17 (7 older adults). Fairly useless, IMO. Having said that, I believe it's been very well documented that touch screens in cars are less usable than the button equivalents, and likely affect driving safety. The only new thing in this study is that it's just worse for older people. (Not that younger people are not impacted).

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

We should NOT have touch screen interfaces in cars. Full stop. If the driver has to divert their gaze from the road to operate e.g. the heating/AC[0], that is a failure of UX sufficiently egregious to keep the car off the road. It is not a toy, it is not a fashion statement, it is a thousand pound chunk of steel that will indiscriminately kill and maim if not operated with care and diligence. [0] This is the complaint I have with my wife's Honda Civic. If I want to do something as simple as turn on the fan but turn off the AC, it means navigating into a sub menu and correctly hitting one of several choices on a touch screen.

aurareturn 2y ago
I wonder if Gen Alpha will prefer pure touchscreen controls in cars.
- dageshi 2y ago
  The youngest in gen alpha are just being born, there's a real chance they may not learn to drive at all because self driving is ubiquitous.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > there's a real chance they may not learn to drive at all because self driving is ubiquitous. I don't see unattended self-driving becoming the norm during the next 20 years. I'm skeptical it'll happen in 50 years. There are an uncountable number of non-foreseeable driving events and road conditions. I believe we'd have to rethink/redesign roads to adjust to limitations of FSD. Past that: A top reason for late teens not driving now is parents can't afford car insurance rates that approach their housing costs.
- VyseofArcadia 2y ago
  Preference is irrelevant. It's demonstrably dangerous. Maybe Gen Alpha will also prefer cars without functioning headlights, but those are thankfully banned.
2y ago

legitster 2y ago

One thing to add to this, it's amazing that in 2025 voice assistants still suck so badly. You'd think this is a problem AI could finally nip in the bud. But even giving my phone the dumbest of instructions will result in an agonizing back and forth where it doesn't hear me quite right and constantly has to repeat back things. Heaven forbid you ask the phone to do anything useful like change a setting or pull up directions for you. You will be unceremoniously dumped out of the conversation and into some sort of hellish afterthought experience.

jeffbee 2y ago
"Pull up directions" is something I feel my phone is extremely good at. What phone are you using?
- bcrl 2y ago
  It downright sucks when the local pronunciation isn't accepted by Siri. In Ottawa we pronounce St. Laurent Boulevard as the French do - "cent lorann", yet Siri only accepts the sourthern style American pronunciation of "saynt lawrence". This happens for a whole lot of place names in eastern Ontario given the bilingual nature of the national capital region. Localization is not a solved problem.
cogogo 2y ago
I ski a lot and wear headphones for music and to take any emergency calls. I use siri to ask “What time is it?” 50:50 whether or not it works. This has been my experience for as long as siri has existed and I have kept up to date on hw and sw. I only stick with it because pulling the phone out in the cold is even more annoying than having to repeat the long press and myself. Don’t get me started on a question that simple needing an internet connection… because I’m excluding that error case.
bcrl 2y ago
Siri was better in the past while driving, and actually helpful at times. Nowadays it demands that I unlock my phone. My mistake? My car doesn't have Car Play. I drove a rental last week and Car Play was far more cooperative. Sadly, it appears that I am being punished because I don't happen to be able to replace my car as often as I upgrade my phone.

nanomonkey 2y ago

Most of my current wants from devices, and mobile computing, overlap quite nicely with what aging communities need from their devices. Sunlight readable displays, buttons that are distinguishable by feeling alone (ever seen the button variety in the cockpit of jet fighters!!!), and the ability to customize outputs in a sane manner that isn't full of twelve layer deep menus of vague options that change with each software update.

withinboredom 2y ago
My son thinks it is magic that I can reach into my bag and pull out exactly what I want without looking. He didn't exactly grow up on touch screens, but I think about how much more tactile my life was as a child compared to his. It is night and day.

TZubiri 2y ago

"had to press a touch screen button to get information while driving" I think that putting touch screens and foregoing physical feedback is the issue, and not old people.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jedberg 2y ago

Older people have dryer hands. My mother in law has trouble with her phone all the time because of this. A vaguely related story: I had to get my fingerprints taken to volunteer at my kids school. They use a touchscreen device to take the fingerprints, and it kept failing. Mind you I was only about 44 at the time, so not exactly elderly. The teenager working the counter says to me, "Oh yeah, that happens to old people a lot, you'll just have keep trying". The sting of calling me old was real. She gave me some hand lotion and after about three more tries it finally read my prints.

joezydeco 2y ago

I'm an older adult that's worked on touch interfaces and whatnot. I don't blame the touch mechanism as much as I blame all the UX designers that adopted Material design schemas and their descendents. Bad layouts, unreadable fonts, horrible color schemes and literally NO contrast between type and background. It's apparent that none of this was tested on older users. Apple is just as guilty of this. If you switch your iPhone into high contrast mode with thicker font weights it helps, but it wasn't necessary back in the early days of iOS.

bcrl 2y ago
Gnome with Enlightenment back in 1999 had configurable window decorations. If you wanted a border around a window that was a few pixels wider and easier to land a mouse on, you could do that. Naturally all of that functionality was thrown out when the Gnome project did a total rewrite that was "going to make everything better" and "fix all of the problems" they ran into in the first version.

mkagenius 2y ago

This is not limited to just cars, lower to mid range mobile phones have touch sensors to unlock phones - they also struggle with dry old skins. The smart watches also struggle when used for measuring ECG or blood pressure. That is just one aspect - older people are most hindered by the UI design in my opinion, the buttons below the fold and not obvious coz they are not visible and when they are filling some form, they just don't know what to do after filling couple of boxes. That's just one example. The recent development in vision LLMs show decent promise and I think we might have to augment touch with voice controls even for handled phones. Old people won't know where the setting to turn off usb debugging is but a LLM knows and can also see things and understand, it should be able to help them.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

postepowanieadm 2y ago

I really like my Mazda's UI: touchpad is disabled while driving, everything is accessible by joystick/dial. I only wish they would use hal effect joystick, less scratchy one.

WarOnPrivacy 2y ago

I believe part of the issue is lawmakers are still dazzled by tech and they over-assume it can improve things. I think that's why we 1) have questionable, federal mandates for automatic breaking and 2) have feds who can't seem to associate distracted driver incidents with in-dash screens. For the latter, preexisting bias against phones kills motivation to seek actual causes.

chaoticmass 2y ago

I have slight nerve issues that make precise double tap gestures difficult. One of the reasons I switched to an iPhone is the accessibility features are quite good and let me work around the issues I have more easily. Given how many older people I see who have the same issue I have but worse, I can imagine this is a very common problem for a lot of people.

thefz 2y ago

Still using my FiiO X3 dearly instead of the phone for music. Why? It has six buttons I can recognise by touch, I don't even have to look at it to change song or navigate its menus.

Jackosas 2y ago

[dead]