[greyhair]

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.

[thesuitonym]

>but are they doing usability testing?

You know they're not. If they were, nobody would ever replace a knob with a touchscreen.

[a2tech]

I can guarantee you that they are doing exhaustive usability testing. I've had friends that worked in Ford's design and usability group. EVERYTHING is extensively demo'ed and discussed to death. My friends in the design group complained that the actual engineers would take their designs and fight them constantly on every change and that what WAS a nice interface was junk by the time it went into the vehicle.

I suspect that the engineers fighting them is really just a case of the hardware team and the software team not understanding the world the other lives in. The hardware team is working with a slow as molasses processor that is the only thing thats been approved for the ridiculously rugged life that a car CPU lives and the software people don't understand that just because a webkit rendering engine is completely fluid on their 6 month old Precision workstation it won't be on a 500mhz in dash processor.

[gwd]

According to the tests:

* The one and only physical button car took 10 seconds total to complete their tasks

* Two touch-screen cars (Volvo C40 and Dacia Sandero) took only 13 seconds to complete the tasks

* Most touch-screen cars take 20-40 seconds

These results are certainly consistent with the hypothesis, "A moderately well-designed physical interface is likely to be better than an extremely well-designed touch-screen interface". But it's not really enough data to support the hypothesis that all physical interfaces are better than all touch-screen interfaces. You'd want to see what the curve looks like -- with it so close, it's quite possible that some, or even many, physical interfaces would take longer than 13 seconds for their benchmark.

And if you slow people down by 30% but reduce costs by a significant fraction, I think that's probably worth it.

[cosmotic]

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.

[ce4]

Or they know what they're doing, hate it but decide for it anyway due to some sort of FOMO (the competition does it also!) Maybe it's comparable to the glossy laptop screen fad some years ago.

[paganel]

> 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

[throwawaylinux]

It used to be not uncommon to have instrument panel dimmer in cars.

[734129837261]

Thanks for clarifying that. I stand corrected.

It all makes sense from just the financial point of view. So that means it isn't going away any time soon, unless there's a huge backlash from consumers.

Perhaps the best thing we can hope for is 1 car manufacturer deciding: "Buttons first, touch screen(s) second."

Let consumers decide with their wallets. Though, I wouldn't be surprised that many consumers go for an inferior product just because it looks cool. Because that, unfortunately, is how humans work.

[BurningFrog]

> Using modal displays to cover multiple controls saves dashboard real estate, and eases design constraints

This makes a ton of sense for displaying state.

For manipulating state I need tactile physical controls.

This is how computers work, and for good reason. I have a big screen to show state, and keyboard + mouse to manipulate it.

[sli]

> Those displays may seem expensive, until you actually price out the panels they are using.

Doesn't stop Toyota for wanting a solid $1000 to replace the display in my 2014 Corolla. Someone's pocketing a lot of money.

[HPsquared]

Night driving is especially annoying if there is a lot of backlight bleed through the display. Perhaps OLED displays would make this better, but of course... more expensive.