[tablespoon]

> The solution to that is simple. Put four/five physical buttons down each side of the screen, maybe along the bottom too, and then you can make everything still programmable in software.

This, though functions like climate control, audio, and anything needed to operate the car while in motion should still have dedicated buttons. Touchscreens in cars are an abomination.

> I have no idea why you absolutely need to put buttons in the middle of the screen to be touched.

They don't need to, they're just following the touchscreen all the things UX fad. Turns out capacitive touchscreens were a great fit for cell phones, but that doesn't mean they have a place anywhere else.

[vikingerik]

Why are capacitative touchscreens such a great fit for cell phones? Because the physical size is so limited. You want to use the same physical space for output (screen) and input (buttons). For a car instrument panel, physical size mostly isn't a concern.

"Touchscreen all the things" was cargo-culting. Apple made a trillion dollars with touch screens, therefore we should use touch screens too.

[mlyle]

There are truly obscure things in cars you don't do often. Changing settings. Programming the radio. Changing a drive mode for specialized off-road use. Getting a report on usage / economy / etc.

If an operation is infrequent and doesn't need to be made when driving, burying it in a touchscreen menu sounds great: conserve those physical control surfaces for stuff that matters so you don't have a ridiculous surplus of buttons. You can go and put the majority of functions on touchscreen menu hell. But don't go and put the climate or windshield wipers or even audio modes on touch surfaces, please. :/

[tablespoon]

> If an operation is infrequent and doesn't need to be made when driving, burying it in a touchscreen menu sounds great: conserve those physical control surfaces for stuff that matters so you don't have a ridiculous surplus of buttons..

That's a bit of a straw man. No one seriously says literally every function needs a button.

And it makes sense to bury seldom-used things in menus. However, there's no reason those menus need to be touchscreen menus.

E.g., in my car, care settings are in a menu, but the screen for it is in the instrument panel and controlled by buttons on the steering wheel. I believe the reason is when it was made they still offered a low-end trim level without a touchscreen entertainment system. This menu is better than a touchscreen, but IMHO it would have been better with done with menu-buttons in the center console screen.

[mlyle]

> That's a bit of a straw man.

It's not a straw man; it's nuanced agreement. It's a shame that people expect argument so much that they can't see where the edges of one opinion are being offered.

> However, there's no reason those menus need to be touchscreen menus.

Might as well be touchscreen menus. Using up and down buttons to pick things in a modal interface isn't clearly superior to a touchscreen for experienced users and worse for new people.

A good button menu system is better than a bad touchscreen, especially with experience. But in a rental car, I appreciate the touchscreens to pair my phone, etc.

[tablespoon]

> It's not a straw man; it's nuanced agreement. It's a shame that people expect argument so much that they can't see where the edges of one opinion are being offered.

I understand that, that's why I said it was "a bit" of one.

> Might as well be touchscreen menus. Using up and down buttons to pick things in a modal interface isn't clearly superior to a touchscreen for experienced users and worse for new people.

IMHO, if you have the space, f-key/button menus (e.g. the hardware shown at https://www.informatique-mania.com/en/tutoriels/quest-ce-que...) are better than touchscreen menus.

[mlyle]

> IMHO, if you have the space, f-key/button menus (e.g. the hardware shown at https://www.informatique-mania.com/en/tutoriels/quest-ce-que...) are better than touchscreen menus.

I like avionics and ATMs where you see these. They're great for experienced users with relatively fixed functionality.

You can't tradeoff UI factors so easily, though. If you usually have 5 options, and found you have 6 somewhere-- you need to break up the section or add a page, etc. And if you add an option the user UI workflow completely changes.

While, with a touchscreen you could accept a smaller target for the least-used option, and adding a new target on a page doesn't change things too much for users (and is arguably more discoverable).

[unbalancedevh]

And speaking of audio, make the volume control a real analog knob that's directly in the output circuit, so when I quickly spin it down it immediately goes down. Not some encoder that's trying to rationalize how far down I really meant to turn it, with an inevitable delay.

[mlyle]

> make the volume control a real analog knob that's directly in the output circuit

I don't miss noisy potentiometers :D

And having a bus with user operations being streamed to it means that designers can choose mappings and behaviors late.

The issue is the delay. I have a lot of amplifiers with knobs that are perceptually instant, even if they really are encoders behind the scene. Stuff is fast enough now that there's no reason for delay. I've built control systems that use encoders that operate at 1000Hz over slower embedded networks than are in modern cars.

[Baeocystin]

And stop having bizarrely chunky steps between volume levels, too. It annoys me regularly that so many of my digital devices have less than a dozen steps between minimum and maximum, leaving me with either too quiet or too loud, and nothing in-between.

[mlyle]

Half a decibel per step is a reasonable chunk; average perceptible change is 1dB but sometimes it's better than that.

Figure maybe 65dB of useful dynamic range in a car + 10dB of range needed based on levels of the recording. That implies you want about 150 steps.

Go ahead and display a number between 1-30 if you want-- that's probably good for usability. I can find "13" and be close to what I typically want. Just, have the actual control surface move 5 steps per number so that I can fine tune.

[withinboredom]

If you’ve ever rented a car in another country, you will find yourself in those menus. Probably while driving. The best cars are when the menus are easy to get to, using buttons on the wheel.

[titzer]

> But don't go and put the climate or windshield wipers or even audio modes on touch surfaces, please. :/

I agree with that, but I don't see any added value of a touchscreen for the other things you mention. It could as well be a deep menu that is still accessed with many button presses to drill down into it.

[mlyle]

> It could as well be a deep menu that is still accessed with many button presses to drill down into it.

I think if I'm not driving, the usability of picking from menus by touch is usually nicer than using buttons to navigate.

If I'm really experienced with the controls, buttons are better than a meh touchscreen.

In a rental car, I appreciate the touchscreen menus.

[dogleash]

And even then… there were people that still preferred the physical keyboards on smartphones even as they fell out of fashion because everyone was chasing apple.

Swipe keyboards are good enough and physical keyboards are out of fashion long enough that it’s been a while since I’ve seen an bluetooth keyboard build into a phone case. But I haven’t actually tested my preference in years.

[saiya-jin]

Car manufacturers are not cargo-culting Apple as much as Tesla. People in industry saw touch screen and went meh, but then people voted with wallets and opinions (Tesla has one big touchscreen, so modern, so much wow, lightyears ahead of everybody else! - heard it gazillion times in the past, no matter how much I tried explain to folks how utterly shitty and cheap that approach is in cars).

In similar way as current/recent SUV cargo-culting. For premium performance manufacturers like Porsche or BMW it didn't make sense, why have bulky car with shitty driving characteristics, slower, much higher roll risk, much higher center of gravity, much smaller inside space than usual family wagons, that costs more to run and buy it from premium brands... thats what you have Fiat Peugeot etc for. Especially for people who drive on paved roads 99/100% of the time, ie typical soccer moms.

I know that inexperienced drivers enjoy higher seating position and feel safer, but I would suggest taking some driving lessons if thats a problem for a given driver, much better results and resulting real safety.

Yet Cayenne and X5 and whatnot sold like hot cakes for premium money because footballers and other celebrities bought them, so eventually every manufacturer jumped on that bandwagon, screw any logic if people buy it. The more performance the brand, the longer it took them to pick this trend up, and thus Ferrari is the last (from what I gathered, not following this topic seriously). And so folks today buy crossovers and god knows what other names are in vogue these days, which are tiny short cars with high ground clearance. To drive in cities.

[pandaman]

Even an experienced driver can appreciate not having the view completely obstructed by the clouds of droplets from the wheels of other cars in a rain and no amount of driving lessons can make one see through the water. On top of better visibility in all weather conditions, SUV offer easier loading/unloading, easier access for setting up children in the child seats and, even though not an off-road vehicle, still much better in the adverse weather (snow, floods) because of high clearance. If you're are not racing the only reason to choose a wagon is the few more cubic feet of room are more important to you than anything above. This is why SUVs displaced wagons IMHO, I doubt people buy so many RAV4s and CR-Vs in the US just because of some footballers who bought Uruses.

[grog454]

> Even an experienced driver can appreciate not having the view completely obstructed by...

Couldn't agree more. I have ~50 hours of seat time driving a high performance mid engine car on a track but in any amount of traffic I prefer my truck. Better visibility, and (imo) better safety due to weight.

It's rarely brought up but even an elementary understanding of physics makes it obvious that less massive things are more fragile and susceptible to deformation than more massive things, all else being equal. Sadly that last point involves a zero sum game: the safer a heavier vehicle is to its occupant the more dangerous it is to others. Even more sadly its a game many people are forced to play.

[pandaman]

One needs to be careful when analyzing safety. NHSTA and similar orgs abroad have conditioned people to only think of safety as the chances of survival in a collision but if you were to look at the actual traffic fatalities [1] you could easily find that some cars with higher fatality stats have also a higher "safety star" rating and vice versa. Likewise, some heavy trucks score higher fatalities than lighter cars. It might be that some cars are better at avoiding collisions than the others.

1. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...

[illiac786]

>better safety

Worse safety for everyone but the driver I would argue. Same for most heavier cars, such as SUVs.

[hombre_fatal]

I don't think that's the reason.

Touchscreens let you build arbitrary UI/UX. You can click anywhere and do gestures anywhere and type anywhere. When there doesn't need to be UI, like when watching a video, the whole phone is the screen. So the UI can optimize for the best UX. It's much more powerful.

With physical buttons, software is pigeon-holed into UI designed around those buttons. It's a massive trade-off. Something we take for granted like navigating a website becomes much more tedious when you only have buttons.

Just look how much effort goes into making software-specific hardware like the scroll wheel/drum on old-gen music players like the iPod, yet it doesn't solve something as simple as typing in a song search query.

[efitz]

> Why are capacitative touchscreens such a great fit for cell phones?

Because you are always staring at the display while using it?

[mulmen]

I touch typed this comment but never obstructed the display to do it.

Why would I want I/O to become IO?

[somat]

I would love a cell phone in a Multi Function Display(MFD) format A row of soft buttons down each side(a software ecosystem that expects soft buttons is also needed).

It would be great, there is very little in the way of a worse UI than trying to use a touch screen in a moving vehicle.

[jrcplus]

Remember, even the original iPhone still had physical buttons/switches for Home, Sleep/Wake, Ring/Silent, and Volume Up and Down.

[fomine3]

It's interesting that Apple still keeps silent toggle switch on iPhone. It looks useful but now Apple sells Apple Watch.

[tablespoon]

> "Touchscreen all the things" was cargo-culting. Apple made a trillion dollars with touch screens, therefore we should use touch screens too.

IMHO, that's one of Apple's biggest competitive advantages. They have so much cachet that everyone assumes whatever they do is "best" and mindlessly apes it. That way they never have any real competition, because followers are always at least a step behind.

[mulmen]

> Turns out capacitive touchscreens were a great fit for cell phones

Yes but to be clear they are still an enormous compromise there. Maybe it is this generation of UX people, maybe it is fundamental to the technology, but there hasn't been much advancement in touch interface tech in years. Apple tried "deep touch" or whatever with feedback but then abandoned it because nobody (users or devs) wanted to deal with it. We just deal with all the downsides of touch screens because the rest of the device gives us such an incredible capability, even with the (sometimes literally) painful UX.

[JohnFen]

> Turns out capacitive touchscreens were a great fit for cell phones

Sure. However removing the physical buttons on cellphones was a pretty big loss that the touchscreens do not make up for.

[illiac786]

I disagree. Increased screen size as a result of removing physical buttons makes up for the loss of physical buttons in my view.

You can now watch a movie, play a game, even browser a crappy website with desktop-only layout on an iPhone Mini. Try to do this if half the screen estate is replaced with physical button.

I am a big fan of physical buttons though, I which apple would add more of them on the sides, with some programmables, that would be awesome. Some Android devices have this for example.

[_carbyau_]

Maybe not in usability but in component costs it likely was great.

As you know, products aren't made for the customer, they are made for the equation: customerMoney - (ProductionCost + MarketingCost etc etc) = Profit