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Count me in the "give me my knobs" crowd: for frequently-accessed features, I absolutely want physical controls. Including temperature and fan, audio, AC, etc. I'm not even much of a fan of the shift toward "programmable" temperature controls: when I'm changing the temperature, it's because I'm too hot or too cold -- what I want is to move the indicator toward where I want to be and not fuss with it. A given cabin temperature: 68F, say, might be comfortable on an overcast day, too warm in direct sunlight, or cold when it's below freezing outside and drafts are intruding. That said, a few nice features here: • Moving the control to the user. Ages ago I noticed a trends in desktop UI. When a window would open a dialog, typically it appears more-or-less at some random location on screen. Microsoft came up with a solution for this: they'd "warp" the mouse pointer to the dialog location. Which meant that wherever I thought my pointer was, it wasn't. A crufty old Unix graphics package, xv, had a much more elegant solution: It would open the dialog, with the default option button positioned under the pointer. It's subtle and it took me a while to realize it, but it floored me when I finally caught on. Sadly, I don't know of any other application (much less desktop or GUI) which practices this principle. Matt's example here does, it's the first I've seen of this in nearly two decades. • The multi-finger touch thing ... I might actually get used to that. Maybe not for primary controls as indicated, but for other advanced features (say, a mapping / navigation system). No, it's not going to work for everyone, but a fallback mode (or modes) could work: hot corners, or similar features. • Keeping the interface pared down to just what's being acted on is useful. I've been going through the process of stripping down web interfaces, mostly for my own benefit, and one thing I've come to realize is how an ugly, messy, disorganized UI often is hugely improved by junking most of it. For most websites I visit, what I'm interested in is the primary content, so getting rid of the ancillary bits doesn't merely lose little, it adds to the experience. For UIs in complex spaces (and a car's internal systems are a modestly complex example), you'd want to be able to dive into a richer interface from time to time, but getting to the bare essentials is definitely useful. So while I'm not sold on the specific implementation (mostly the use case), the concepts here are good. |