I'm usually a defender of the single screen on the Model 3/Y, but on this, the author is right: the new UI (v11) is terrible compared to the previous one (v10).
Not only does it hide commonly-used safety-relevant functions behind extra taps in sub-menus (as detailed), it was apparently done to free up space to offer a 'dock' of app buttons - three permanant and three 'recently used'. I struggled to choose three apps I needed enough to fill the permanant spaces - and certainly don't need quick access (when I'm driving!) to Netflix, or games, or whatever is popping up in 'recently used' today. I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available, but alas that's been hidden too.
It's a total cluster-f*ck that makes no logical sense when considering the need of drivers, and I hope they listen and revert at least this aspect of the UI.
What I really dislike about the "you don't own this, the cloud does" is apps changing without me having a say in it. Spotify is great, but if they decide they want a videoclip-playing-background then my phone at some random moment starts doing that. I feel like it takes some time / attention from me each time something like that happens because now I need to figure out how to turn it off or live with it. And I can't control when it happens, so I'm probably doing something else. This wasn't a thing let's say 15 years ago with the original iPod.
Now imagine this happening to your car. I would sell the car as soon as possible. Cars, like ipods, are tools that should not require extra attention at random moments.
love the way you crystalized this. It's strange to me how bad UX can devolve at the hands of people whose profession is UX. I trust they aren't intentionally doing it. And other factors like ads, "need to monetize", "short-sighted KPIs", all makes sense.
What mechanisms are at play that allow professional UX design teams to fuck up a car display?
like literally i dont want to think when i need to defrost my window going 70mph and yet here we are
Something I've noticed is that whilst big, glamorous releases tend to be more popular within many companies, evolutionary releases tend to be friendlier toward users.
Products evolving more gradually doesn't entirely solve the issue you're concerned by, but users don't have to take on the full brunt of massive product changes all at once.
Don't you think there's also a discussion on the "change for the sake of change"? Was there anything wrong with the v10 design, and was it actually improved with v11?
My Samsung S21 just updated to Android 12 yesterday, and with it a new One UI is on my phone. There's no striking difference here, but the size of items in the curtain have been made smaller, and the brightness slider is different. I have no clue why those things changed. The curtain seem to change every two generations at most, usually just changing spacing and size of the items. It's annoying at best, and the only positive thing is that feeling of "something new", which wanes fast.
Why would companies spend budget on this kind of pseudo improvement is beyond me.
The problem with "data driven" approaches is that they often miss the context.
Which can make their results absolute garbage.
Like data driven can tell you a button is "not used often" it can't tell you that a button is "essential to be fast available in some safety critical situations". (Or for other examples, that a feature is not unused because people don't want it but because it's hidden or bad designed.)
But somehow I still meat people which believe that poorly data driven approaches will yield the best results, which as far as I can tell is complete unrealistic. (Which doesn't mean in any way you shouldn't also use data for decisions, just be aware that data just shows a part of an picture and can often be very misleading.)
Tricky thing about "data driven" / behaviour observation is:
App/icon X may be the most COMMONLY used one.
But it doesn't necessarily make it the most IMPORTANT one, the one I need to reach in a hurry / most easily.
I don't know how to capture, via automated telemetry, "this occasional button I REALLY REALLY need"... so it's just hubris then.
I'm an outsider, I've only entered Tesla's as opposed to driven them, but the UX is such a massive deal-breaker for this old grouch, it's unbelievable. I wish it weren't so but c'est la vie.
> I'm sure the decision was "data driven" based on real life usage.
You're assuming Tesla's end goal is to make the car more usable, and not to maximize revenue.
Their goal is to be transportation smart TV. Sell apps, media, advertising, etc. That's why so much money is being poured into self-driving cars. Americans in particular spend a massive amount of time staring at pavement, and that represents a huge untapped market.
Self-driving cars aren't about the betterment of humanity; the deaths and injuries are certainly horrific in scale, but self-driving cars don't solve the primary problem: our heavy use of low occupancy vehicle trips is not sustainable environmentally, energy-wise, land-use wise (roads or parking), logistically, economically (6+ year car loans, crumbling infrastructure because we can't afford to keep it all in good repair, etc)
If it's anything like most of the software industry, being data driven means you look for data to support what you wanted to do already, but pretend you're being objective and rigorous.
I doubt the move was "data driven". Elon has made it very clear his vision is to make the car automated enough that the driver doesn't need to interact with the UI. If anything, he's intentionally trying to change user behavior and train drivers they don't "need" these controls.
Hm, when they took away the defog button did they control for cold/wet/rain? Sure, the defog button isn't used much when you don't need to defog, but when you do, you need it right away!
I'm a big Model 3 fan but I hate the new UI. At least let us use the new docking areas for every possible function.
Up till now the windshield wiper control was the biggest model 3 UX issue. When I took delivery of my model 3 it started raining and I almost had an accident trying to figure out how to get the wipers working. The auto-wiper function sucks big time. But now there's more fairly important functions that are really hard to get to, from annoying (driver profiles) to safety (defog).
> Can you imagine, taking your Honda Accord in for an oil change, and you find out that dealer completely re-arranged your center console?
That got me laughing. :) I would be _convinced_ it's a joke and my friends are behind this and want to give me a treat in already sucking Covid-times..
> I'm sure the decision was "data driven" based on real life usage.
This is also how we ended up with the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office 2007 and beyond, then later other places within Windows (Explorer, Paint, etc). Microsoft essentially collected click statistics across various UIs and used those for decision making to choose which buttons would be big and which would be buried under small icons or sub-menus.
I'm used to it now, but it was jarring and took a while.
To add heaps of salt to the injury - automotive functions like seat heaters, defroster, wipers, energy usage, etc. - those cannot be pinned to the quick access bar. Only apps like Spotify, Netflix, browser,...
It's a CAR, ffs! Tesla, please stop acting like it's a cell phone
Interesting how a software update can make a car less safe without any option for the owner to go back.
Sadly we see such things more and more. For example a 3 year old TV looses apps such as Netflix or Skype which where specifically advertised on the box.
To me, it's difficult to believe this is legal. Compare with: FCC Certification. If you change something that could affect the 'intentional emitters' in your product, you need to re-certify!
There ought to be an option to 'stay' at any 'version' you want. Only permit bug fixes. You know, LTS....
After an update, my vizo tv started going to a hub so they can show me ads... if it doesn't receive signal for 10 seconds... I would never have bought it as a computer monitor if that had been the case at time of purchase. Even when using it as a tv, that has to be infuriating.
And I'm usually a defender of most interface updates, I know most people resist change especially when it impacts their muscle memory. But I think that change is good for the brain.
That being said, the new interface is terrible. So many things now take 3 taps as opposed to one.
I wonder if Tesla made the mistake of using A/B testing instead of vision-driven design like Apple. (Side note, just finished reading "Creative Selection" by Ken Kocienda of Apple, an interesting read on Apple's approach to design and why it is so successful as opposed to Google's).
I was listening to Joe Rogan the other day, trying to see what the fuss was about, but I ended up listening to Carrot Top for 3 hours[0]. They where talking for a minute about wealth, and how once you go over the threshold of never having to worry about money, it doesn't keep getting better. You don't feel much difference between 10M and 100M, apparently. Rogan gave the example of his baller house. He said that no matter how amazing your house is, you might have a mansion with two pools and dining for 200 guests, and a games room designed by Vanilla Ice. But once the glow of the newness fades away, then it is just your house. It is just the same place you go to every night. All stuff has this property.
Tesla are trying to recreate that new car smell and feeling by refreshing the digital dash board and software features. And deploying an old Microsoft trick of rearanging buttons to produce a new experience out of nothing. Instead of fighting the falling attention spans, Tesla hopes to remove the need for them altogether. So you can continue tapping and scrolling while driving.
Take my upvote. Came here to say exactly this. If the author is getting attacked on Twitter I wonder how many of the attackers are Tesla shareholders (or bots for shareholders) vs actual owners. The new UI is a step back and hides often used functions that used to be “one click” off the Home Screen. Changing driver profiles is a great example.
Perhaps the solution is to introduce tactility and permanent consistency into the system, by gasp using a button of some sort. Nah, that's too outdated and not futuristic enough!
I too think the single screen is great for simplicity and making the cost of features I don't care about (many) low because they can just be buried in a sub-menu.
Tesla UI has always seemed pretty terrible to me though. Their use of space, and insistence that you need to see a photo realistic picture of the car you are driving that takes up a massive amount of real estate is crazy to me.
On the other hand, I find a lot of car companies struggle with UI once screens come into play.
Screens are hard. When I made http://www.skylinesort.com, it was a challenge getting everything symmetrical at all screen sizes for the whole animation.
Even apart from hiding important icons, simply redesigning a UI for a car sounds like a questionable idea to me. You think you know your car and where everything is, and suddenly, while driving, you discover that everything is in a different location. Even just that can he a bad idea in situations where your eyes should be on the road.
> I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available
This annoys me because our Model 3 can never decide who is getting in for a drive. Without fail it trys to adjust the seat to accommodate my 5 foot partner when my 6 foot frame is in the seat.
The removal of the profile icon makes undoing this even more of a chore.
"Data-driven UI design" can easily be myopic and sometimes disastrous. If you blindly follow the frequency of UI actions, you may hide seldom-used actions that are critical for safety in rare moments; or you may overly optimize for pro users and leave first-time users out in the cold.
> I'm usually a defender of the single screen on the Model 3/Y
Slightly off-topic, but out of curiosity: what is your typical defense here? I've seen a lot of people complain about it (and their arguments make sense to me), but I haven't seen anyone defending it. Yet.
>I'm usually a defender of the single screen on the Model 3/Y,
Nothing on earth would convince me there is any necessity whatsoever to having a screen in your car, much less a touchscreen. But then again I'm also against power steering, ABS, and generally any and all electronics that obstruct feeling from the steering column. Don't even get me started on automatics. Cars for me ended in the 80's, everything after that has been gravy. I see Tesla as nothing but gravy.
I'd be curious to hear why/how you defend it? I cannot think of a single benefit.
You lost me on being against ABS. I understand your position being that automation reduces the senatorial feedback, it is an abstraction with loss of information, but in the case of ABS there is nothing a driver can do better than an ABS, no matter how much feedback they have.
Regarding the other examples of driving aids, yes, those are abstractions with some drawbacks, and a top-of-the-curve driver could do a better job without it. But still they could be a net positive because of the benefit they bring to not-that-good drivers.
Screens though, those I agree 100% shouldn't be on a car.
Irrelevant aside: "Gravy" usually means a nice bonus. Similar to "lagniappe," though I don't know why I'm explaining an idiom by mentioning a far more obscure idiom.
As in: "I made all my money back in the first week, everything since has been gravy."
I agree it's not a necessity, but I simply find that it works very well for me in practice, the vast majority of the time (current UI update aside).
For example, this may not be common, but I find I can glance at the speed/car status section of the screen more quickly than I can glance down at a set of dials in the traditional position, and weirdly the sidways/down glance seems to retain more peripheral vision of the windscreen/road than the downwards glance to the traditional location.
I agree, except for ABS and power steering. As much as I think Tesla is overrated and overpriced, human drivers suck really badly at the edge cases. Certainly the vast majority of people can't out brake an ABS in slippery conditions let alone while still having the ability to steer.
> "The problem isn’t really that complicated: originally the defroster icon was visible on the bottom. With the latest December 2021 update it is now hidden behind the temperature indicator. Tapping the temperature brings up a sub-window with the defroster icon."
Even after reading that, I had to look at the pictures again, and read the paragraph again to find where you are supposed to tap. When they simplified the UI, they also removed the degrees symbol and the fan.
Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
> When they simplified the UI, they also removed the degrees symbol and the fan.
This, I believe, is the real point of failure. The value of reorganizing the icons into sub-menus can be debated, but some of the details that were removed in the course of this change appear to have been critical.
There is a concept in UX design called "information scent" – the combination of spatial, contextual, and cultural cues that clue a user in to where they can find what they're looking for. Simply keeping the fan icon next to the temperature display/button might have been enough to make the mental connection for the OP (and likely countless others).
Of course, this is the kind of thing that tends to shake out in user testing, and I'm very surprised that this appears not to have shown up in the testing I would assume Tesla must do with any change to the dashboard, certainly one this fundamental.
I somewhat disagree. My brain does not see a climate control button and think "that button which can control fan speed and cabin temperature probably also controls the weakly-related function of window demisting".
I would have no trouble adapting one I knew, but I doubt that I would find it for myself. And relying upon users discovering where functions are located by randomly pressing buttons is a bad UX/interface for a vehicle IMO.
> Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
I would not even consider the speed being on the center console so I’d have assumed it would be the temperature either way.
However in all the cars I’ve used that would either be completely inanimate (as affordance as it would be easy to hit when trying to increase or decrease the temperature), or it would lead to extended climate control configuration (e.g. vent speed, multi-zone temps, …).
I’d never think of looking for the defroster there though: while defrosting uses the same hardware as climate control (heating and vents), it’s not actually the same function.
What’s funny is… the center screen is exactly where the speed is, as in the Model 3 there is no other screen. So this is a completely legitimate confusion.
> I would not even consider the speed being on the center console so I’d have assumed it would be the temperature either way.
When I saw it in the article, I actually initially assumed that it was the speed set for cruise control, as it lacked a degree symbol and had up/down symbols suggesting that it can be adjusted in increments. The up/down symbols suggests to me that it cannot be tapped to access other functionality, but that I should tap the arrow to adjust the number.
I didn’t even realise it could be a temperature, as it has no units, and temperatures are in Celsius over here: 70 is just not possible, unless it’s about the engine oil temperature…
> Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
Maybe some brainiac at Tesla thought that you can just accelerate/brake to figure that out. :D
> ...Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
In my view, the actual cabin temp reading is not of such importance to be on the main view panel as such. Maybe just some +/- warm/cold controls. I'm not into measurements, just immediate comfort.
If needed, then, sure, detailed info/climate subscreen.
But defroster/defogger button must be visible, just for the sake of "least surprise" principle!
The manufacturer changing the UI of a car after you bought it should be illegal or at least highly restricted.
I think many of us have been incensed by UI changes in software we use for our daily work, and that's already bad enough; but IMHO this really crosses a line.
There were jokes when Apple changed the scroll direction, comparing it to the steering wheel of a car suddenly working opposite to what everyone is used to; I'm not sure if it's possible to do that with a Tesla or other modern car, but it's disturbing that we seem to be headed down that path. What an absurd reality.
The icons-only UI is also a huge regression; would it really take much extra effort to add a text label? I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up, but much of the world knows English, this is an American car sold in English-speaking regions, and changing the text in software is much easier than a separate part with different printing.
(I drive a 50-year-old land yacht that's received many upgrades, but all under my control; so my perspective may be slightly biased...)
This might be a "feature": make cars so confusing to manually drive that humans become worse at driving, so that Tesla doesn't need to improve its driving software.
I don't actually believe this, of course, but it seems we're headed in that trajectory.
Tesla drivers have called this a feature not a bug for years and bragged that their vehicles can update over the air like a smartphone… while the physical knobs on my Subaru will only ever do what they were designed to do when I bought it.
Well, just like a smartphone, sometimes the latest OS update makes changes that people don’t like. For good or ill, I think the Tesla way is probably the future for most cars and my not-so-smart vehicle UX will be increasingly rare.
I truly believe that UI in software must be done by an external consultant, on a one-time contract basis. Don't hire them full-time, they will fuck it up eventually. It is extremely limiting for a designer to work on the same app, same design every day. They will always try to bring in a new UI every couple years, just to maintain their own sanity. But it's not good for the product and its users. So let designers work on various different products.
>I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up,
How so? If they design something that doesn't fit the screen, etc. in another language - it's just a bad design. Localizations have been a standard process for decades already. They can be quite challenging when it comes to bidi, yet most left to right languages are no issue to even bring the topic.
I would say that most of the customers that buy Tesla more or less expect the UI to change with time. That's why they bought the car in the first place.
- I know I do, love the fact that the car still feels alive and evolving after I bought it.
Then I think the new ui is worse than the older one - but my wife prefers the new one.
This works well until your last resort brand just follows the trend.
For instance, I'd bet getting stick shift in a new car in 15 years would cost the price of a Ferrari. That's what it would mean to "vote with your wallet".
> The manufacturer changing the UI of a car after you bought it should be illegal or at least highly restricted.
Mandatory user feature flags would be a good solution for that. After installation if you don't opt-in for the new features you get the same behavior as before.
I hope they filed an NHTSA complaint, as they’re describing a software update that will increase the risk of collisions, injuries, and/or deaths if left uncorrected.
US Tesla owners, if your Tesla is affected by this issue, and you believe that removing the one-tap defroster button is a safety risk to your driving, please report that ASAP: https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem
That's similar to my own thought. An update that affects controls for safety-relevant features - and defrost certainly qualifies - should require prior approval just like a physical update to each year's model would. This update should never have reached cars on the road.
That’s not our call to make when filing a safety complaint. The NHTSA is tasked with evaluating safety complaints from drivers, interpreting the rules and law, and reaching a judgment on whether a response should occur. Our part in the NHTSA process is to file the safety complaint, not to tell them how to do their job in response to it.
For those of you that file a complaint, please maintain your focus on the safety issues the update has created in your driving, rather than verging into specific demands of outcome. “I can’t find my front defroster while I’m driving since XYZ software update” is really great and specific, “so therefore Tesla and NHTSA should do ABC” is unhelpful and does not strengthen your case. No need to backseat-drive the NHTSA, just please do get the safety report filed.
Scott Jenson is great. It’s sad that he got so trolled.
I hope the folks at Tesla paid attention. He’s one of the top UX people in the world.
His book, The Simplicity Shift[0], was one of the seminal UX books in my career. I still use many of the insights that I gleaned from it.
It’s a real short read (and a free download, now). It was written when everyone was still using flip phones, and was very useful in doing a brutal UX triage.
Thank you for the link to the book. It reminds me of a product I worked on. The first version was command-driven, because that's what us programmers were used to. When our own sales people proved unable to do a demo without messing it up, we knew it was time to go back to the drawing board. We tucked the keyboard away in a drawer where you would pull it out only when needed, and replaced it with 6 buttons. Those buttons let you pick from a preconfigured menu, which walked you through the process step by step once you selected something.
I work on UX/UI for startups. Have both worked for big tech companies and have many designer friends in big Tech co’s. The pattern I unfortunately see is that many of the larger firms somehow think they need dozens (a few cases: hundreds) of product designers who are all fiddling in the exact same interface. It’s absolutely nuts.
It becomes an internal battle of who finds a more clever way to present a design in a meeting to a product manager. I’m sure all of OP’s complaints sounded like very clever solutions in meetings. But that’s not where your users are.
Please. Keep your design team to a minimum. Design is not like engineering. More designers working on a single piece of software is counter productive.
Another way to think of this is: no one gets promoted for keeping things the same or making small optimizations. PM’s/designers get rewarded for sweeping changes, which is why UI for a given product often gets worse instead of better. The first version was the usable bare-bones MVP, then things bloat as ppl stuff in features, then it all gets swept away in a “refresh” which often buries the most useful stuff that was simple and boring for the PMs — but they forget about new users seeing it all for the first time.
It would be awesome if tesla let us truly customize the UI with some CSS, or at least accept a few themes that they bless. I want to have my energy usage always visible somewhere on screen, for example, without completely blocking the map…
Customization is nice, but it's a nightmare for testing and support. You can't test every combination, and you can never know if you're seeing the same thing the customer sees. Plus it's murder if you have to share a device with someone else. I have enough trouble just with the radio presets between myself and my wife!
I drive often rental cars. A lot of modern cars have a difficult UI. Often are things somewhere hidden, while even on the oldest car, there was just a button.
I've seen initial versions of UIs having been created in a certain way because of multiple valid reasons (people that worked on it really put some thoughts into it), those reasons (priorities of fields, differentiation of informations, speed of entering data, overview of the data, ...) were never written anywhere => the next people that worked on it changed that because of any reason and the result was often worse - maybe by having guidelines/explanations associated to the UI (similar to what is done for the app's code) would avoid that.
I think you’re hitting on a real problem, but one that’s slightly adjacent to what you describe. The size of the design team is correlated with, but not the cause of dysfunctional product and design management. A large team where responsibilities and ownership have clear delineation, and ideas are validated through research, shouldn’t result in cleverness competitions.
There's that, and there's the fact that once you show up to the meeting it's basically open season for anyone with eyeballs to give their hot takes about design as well.
At least in a restaurant, there's not a line of people who've just finished your food who are about to tell you how you should actually cook it.
Thing is, it‘s not just Tesla. Old economy carmakers are taking a page from the playbook by now to skip to the front line — and it‘s exactly the wrong one.
Having driven the VW ID3 a few times, it‘s truly horrible in this regard.
The climate settings (yes, including fast defrost!) are „not available“ until the systems have booted up which takes forever.
Auto-Hold as a critical driving feature which had a hardware button before took me (as an engineer) a whopping 10 minutes to find in the third page of a random submenu.
The voice control is located as a touch-not-press button at the outer edge of a steering wheel so when (not if) you accidentally touch it in narrow turns, the confused useless voice blasts full volume at you while you‘re in the most complex driving situation.
It‘s as nobody had driven or user tested their cars before.
And here I am, an early technology adopter of two decades, feeling like an old man yelling I want my hardware buttons back.
> If you need to take your eyes away from the road, it is a shit ui.
I'd add one more point specific to vehicle (or other safety-related) applications: if it keeps changing, it's shit. I shouldn't have to hunt around for where that control went today any more than I should have to hunt around for where it went the first time. That is why I think touchscreens with tactile feedback don't solve this problem, even though they're cool in general. That customizability is worthless because the controls shouldn't be changing anyway. Just put in real buttons, knobs, and so on.
Readit News
Not only does it hide commonly-used safety-relevant functions behind extra taps in sub-menus (as detailed), it was apparently done to free up space to offer a 'dock' of app buttons - three permanant and three 'recently used'. I struggled to choose three apps I needed enough to fill the permanant spaces - and certainly don't need quick access (when I'm driving!) to Netflix, or games, or whatever is popping up in 'recently used' today. I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available, but alas that's been hidden too.
It's a total cluster-f*ck that makes no logical sense when considering the need of drivers, and I hope they listen and revert at least this aspect of the UI.
Now imagine this happening to your car. I would sell the car as soon as possible. Cars, like ipods, are tools that should not require extra attention at random moments.
What mechanisms are at play that allow professional UX design teams to fuck up a car display?
like literally i dont want to think when i need to defrost my window going 70mph and yet here we are
Products evolving more gradually doesn't entirely solve the issue you're concerned by, but users don't have to take on the full brunt of massive product changes all at once.
My Samsung S21 just updated to Android 12 yesterday, and with it a new One UI is on my phone. There's no striking difference here, but the size of items in the curtain have been made smaller, and the brightness slider is different. I have no clue why those things changed. The curtain seem to change every two generations at most, usually just changing spacing and size of the items. It's annoying at best, and the only positive thing is that feeling of "something new", which wanes fast.
Why would companies spend budget on this kind of pseudo improvement is beyond me.
I agree with everything you said apart from the "Spotify is great" part.
It's a bit disturbing they're able to make such drastic level of changes without heads up.
Can you imagine, taking your Honda Accord in for an oil change, and you find out that dealer completely re-arranged your center console?
I wish more features tied to safety should be available via physical switches. Even Model 3 has a physical hazard light switch.
Which can make their results absolute garbage.
Like data driven can tell you a button is "not used often" it can't tell you that a button is "essential to be fast available in some safety critical situations". (Or for other examples, that a feature is not unused because people don't want it but because it's hidden or bad designed.)
But somehow I still meat people which believe that poorly data driven approaches will yield the best results, which as far as I can tell is complete unrealistic. (Which doesn't mean in any way you shouldn't also use data for decisions, just be aware that data just shows a part of an picture and can often be very misleading.)
App/icon X may be the most COMMONLY used one.
But it doesn't necessarily make it the most IMPORTANT one, the one I need to reach in a hurry / most easily.
I don't know how to capture, via automated telemetry, "this occasional button I REALLY REALLY need"... so it's just hubris then.
I'm an outsider, I've only entered Tesla's as opposed to driven them, but the UX is such a massive deal-breaker for this old grouch, it's unbelievable. I wish it weren't so but c'est la vie.
Touchscreens for any functions related to operating the vehicle should be regulated out of existence IMO. It’s a car not a phone.
The optimisation function should be how much you can do without needing to look away from the road.
You're assuming Tesla's end goal is to make the car more usable, and not to maximize revenue.
Their goal is to be transportation smart TV. Sell apps, media, advertising, etc. That's why so much money is being poured into self-driving cars. Americans in particular spend a massive amount of time staring at pavement, and that represents a huge untapped market.
Self-driving cars aren't about the betterment of humanity; the deaths and injuries are certainly horrific in scale, but self-driving cars don't solve the primary problem: our heavy use of low occupancy vehicle trips is not sustainable environmentally, energy-wise, land-use wise (roads or parking), logistically, economically (6+ year car loans, crumbling infrastructure because we can't afford to keep it all in good repair, etc)
That's because a physical hazard light switch is required by law.
I'm a big Model 3 fan but I hate the new UI. At least let us use the new docking areas for every possible function.
Up till now the windshield wiper control was the biggest model 3 UX issue. When I took delivery of my model 3 it started raining and I almost had an accident trying to figure out how to get the wipers working. The auto-wiper function sucks big time. But now there's more fairly important functions that are really hard to get to, from annoying (driver profiles) to safety (defog).
This is really hard to understand and concerning.
That got me laughing. :) I would be _convinced_ it's a joke and my friends are behind this and want to give me a treat in already sucking Covid-times..
This is also how we ended up with the ribbon interface in Microsoft Office 2007 and beyond, then later other places within Windows (Explorer, Paint, etc). Microsoft essentially collected click statistics across various UIs and used those for decision making to choose which buttons would be big and which would be buried under small icons or sub-menus.
I'm used to it now, but it was jarring and took a while.
If ever there was a case of “you break it, you bought it”.
It's a CAR, ffs! Tesla, please stop acting like it's a cell phone
What's next, Microsoft Excel?
I knew Tesla UX was, um, interesting, but this takes it to a whole another level.
Sadly we see such things more and more. For example a 3 year old TV looses apps such as Netflix or Skype which where specifically advertised on the box.
There ought to be an option to 'stay' at any 'version' you want. Only permit bug fixes. You know, LTS....
That being said, the new interface is terrible. So many things now take 3 taps as opposed to one.
I wonder if Tesla made the mistake of using A/B testing instead of vision-driven design like Apple. (Side note, just finished reading "Creative Selection" by Ken Kocienda of Apple, an interesting read on Apple's approach to design and why it is so successful as opposed to Google's).
In a car you want muscle memory, not "good for the brain"
Tesla are trying to recreate that new car smell and feeling by refreshing the digital dash board and software features. And deploying an old Microsoft trick of rearanging buttons to produce a new experience out of nothing. Instead of fighting the falling attention spans, Tesla hopes to remove the need for them altogether. So you can continue tapping and scrolling while driving.
[0] Warning: even Carrot Top may offend some viewers today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhzsQ0AzYI
Tesla UI has always seemed pretty terrible to me though. Their use of space, and insistence that you need to see a photo realistic picture of the car you are driving that takes up a massive amount of real estate is crazy to me.
On the other hand, I find a lot of car companies struggle with UI once screens come into play.
This annoys me because our Model 3 can never decide who is getting in for a drive. Without fail it trys to adjust the seat to accommodate my 5 foot partner when my 6 foot frame is in the seat.
The removal of the profile icon makes undoing this even more of a chore.
Lots of hate on this TMC thread on v11 [1]
[1] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/v11-software-update-...
From all the other stories on TMC, TeslaLounge etc., I think the more notable detail is that you got a loaner at all.
Stories abound of "Sorry. No loaner. You get Uber credits." "Uhh, there's not really any Uber near me." "Sucks to be you, I guess."
Maybe Tesla's UI team thinks they design the UI for self driving car
/end rant
Slightly off-topic, but out of curiosity: what is your typical defense here? I've seen a lot of people complain about it (and their arguments make sense to me), but I haven't seen anyone defending it. Yet.
Nothing on earth would convince me there is any necessity whatsoever to having a screen in your car, much less a touchscreen. But then again I'm also against power steering, ABS, and generally any and all electronics that obstruct feeling from the steering column. Don't even get me started on automatics. Cars for me ended in the 80's, everything after that has been gravy. I see Tesla as nothing but gravy.
I'd be curious to hear why/how you defend it? I cannot think of a single benefit.
Regarding the other examples of driving aids, yes, those are abstractions with some drawbacks, and a top-of-the-curve driver could do a better job without it. But still they could be a net positive because of the benefit they bring to not-that-good drivers.
Screens though, those I agree 100% shouldn't be on a car.
As in: "I made all my money back in the first week, everything since has been gravy."
For example, this may not be common, but I find I can glance at the speed/car status section of the screen more quickly than I can glance down at a set of dials in the traditional position, and weirdly the sidways/down glance seems to retain more peripheral vision of the windscreen/road than the downwards glance to the traditional location.
So it's a Tesla.
Even after reading that, I had to look at the pictures again, and read the paragraph again to find where you are supposed to tap. When they simplified the UI, they also removed the degrees symbol and the fan.
Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
(Disclosure, I work for GM)
This, I believe, is the real point of failure. The value of reorganizing the icons into sub-menus can be debated, but some of the details that were removed in the course of this change appear to have been critical.
There is a concept in UX design called "information scent" – the combination of spatial, contextual, and cultural cues that clue a user in to where they can find what they're looking for. Simply keeping the fan icon next to the temperature display/button might have been enough to make the mental connection for the OP (and likely countless others).
Of course, this is the kind of thing that tends to shake out in user testing, and I'm very surprised that this appears not to have shown up in the testing I would assume Tesla must do with any change to the dashboard, certainly one this fundamental.
I would have no trouble adapting one I knew, but I doubt that I would find it for myself. And relying upon users discovering where functions are located by randomly pressing buttons is a bad UX/interface for a vehicle IMO.
EDIT: Or how about this one as in my 2000 model S4: http://www.2040-parts.com/_content/items/images/50/340150/00...
I don’t think I would have EVER tapped on the temperature without reading about it somewhere.
It doesn’t look tappable, as the article says. It’s not a common thing to tap on in other systems I’m aware of.
I think the writer’s guess of the car icon is excellent. That probably would have been my first guess too.
(I’ve also never used a Tesla)
I had foggy windows and had to watch a youtube video to figure it out before I could drive the car.
I would not even consider the speed being on the center console so I’d have assumed it would be the temperature either way.
However in all the cars I’ve used that would either be completely inanimate (as affordance as it would be easy to hit when trying to increase or decrease the temperature), or it would lead to extended climate control configuration (e.g. vent speed, multi-zone temps, …).
I’d never think of looking for the defroster there though: while defrosting uses the same hardware as climate control (heating and vents), it’s not actually the same function.
https://cdn.carbuzz.com/gallery-images/original/270000/800/2...
When I saw it in the article, I actually initially assumed that it was the speed set for cruise control, as it lacked a degree symbol and had up/down symbols suggesting that it can be adjusted in increments. The up/down symbols suggests to me that it cannot be tapped to access other functionality, but that I should tap the arrow to adjust the number.
The UX sucks, but if you did know where climate control features are hidden, why would you not assume the demister function is elsewhere?
UX is interesting because what is seemingly common sense to me (demister = climate control) is totally not to others.
Maybe some brainiac at Tesla thought that you can just accelerate/brake to figure that out. :D
In my view, the actual cabin temp reading is not of such importance to be on the main view panel as such. Maybe just some +/- warm/cold controls. I'm not into measurements, just immediate comfort.
If needed, then, sure, detailed info/climate subscreen.
But defroster/defogger button must be visible, just for the sake of "least surprise" principle!
I think many of us have been incensed by UI changes in software we use for our daily work, and that's already bad enough; but IMHO this really crosses a line.
There were jokes when Apple changed the scroll direction, comparing it to the steering wheel of a car suddenly working opposite to what everyone is used to; I'm not sure if it's possible to do that with a Tesla or other modern car, but it's disturbing that we seem to be headed down that path. What an absurd reality.
The icons-only UI is also a huge regression; would it really take much extra effort to add a text label? I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up, but much of the world knows English, this is an American car sold in English-speaking regions, and changing the text in software is much easier than a separate part with different printing.
(I drive a 50-year-old land yacht that's received many upgrades, but all under my control; so my perspective may be slightly biased...)
I cannot agree more. A lot of safety in driving comes from muscle memory and doing without needing to look so that focus is on the road.
No wonder Tesla fans are fan of self driving and afraid of human driving, the effing Teslas seem like a usability nightmare.
This might be a "feature": make cars so confusing to manually drive that humans become worse at driving, so that Tesla doesn't need to improve its driving software.
I don't actually believe this, of course, but it seems we're headed in that trajectory.
Well, just like a smartphone, sometimes the latest OS update makes changes that people don’t like. For good or ill, I think the Tesla way is probably the future for most cars and my not-so-smart vehicle UX will be increasingly rare.
Deleted Comment
paycheck, see my other comment [0] for an example
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30145176
How so? If they design something that doesn't fit the screen, etc. in another language - it's just a bad design. Localizations have been a standard process for decades already. They can be quite challenging when it comes to bidi, yet most left to right languages are no issue to even bring the topic.
Then I think the new ui is worse than the older one - but my wife prefers the new one.
Why? Just don't buy a Tesla or other cars that do this.
You don't have to outlaw everything you don't like, you can just choose not to patronize the people who do this. Vote with your wallet!
How does that help when a Tesla wrecks my car because they were looking for the defogging button instead of looking at the road?
For instance, I'd bet getting stick shift in a new car in 15 years would cost the price of a Ferrari. That's what it would mean to "vote with your wallet".
Mandatory user feature flags would be a good solution for that. After installation if you don't opt-in for the new features you get the same behavior as before.
US Tesla owners, if your Tesla is affected by this issue, and you believe that removing the one-tap defroster button is a safety risk to your driving, please report that ASAP: https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem
For those of you that file a complaint, please maintain your focus on the safety issues the update has created in your driving, rather than verging into specific demands of outcome. “I can’t find my front defroster while I’m driving since XYZ software update” is really great and specific, “so therefore Tesla and NHTSA should do ABC” is unhelpful and does not strengthen your case. No need to backseat-drive the NHTSA, just please do get the safety report filed.
I hope the folks at Tesla paid attention. He’s one of the top UX people in the world.
His book, The Simplicity Shift[0], was one of the seminal UX books in my career. I still use many of the insights that I gleaned from it.
It’s a real short read (and a free download, now). It was written when everyone was still using flip phones, and was very useful in doing a brutal UX triage.
[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
It becomes an internal battle of who finds a more clever way to present a design in a meeting to a product manager. I’m sure all of OP’s complaints sounded like very clever solutions in meetings. But that’s not where your users are.
Please. Keep your design team to a minimum. Design is not like engineering. More designers working on a single piece of software is counter productive.
It would be awesome if tesla let us truly customize the UI with some CSS, or at least accept a few themes that they bless. I want to have my energy usage always visible somewhere on screen, for example, without completely blocking the map…
In many cases it should?
I've seen initial versions of UIs having been created in a certain way because of multiple valid reasons (people that worked on it really put some thoughts into it), those reasons (priorities of fields, differentiation of informations, speed of entering data, overview of the data, ...) were never written anywhere => the next people that worked on it changed that because of any reason and the result was often worse - maybe by having guidelines/explanations associated to the UI (similar to what is done for the app's code) would avoid that.
At least in a restaurant, there's not a line of people who've just finished your food who are about to tell you how you should actually cook it.
Having driven the VW ID3 a few times, it‘s truly horrible in this regard.
The climate settings (yes, including fast defrost!) are „not available“ until the systems have booted up which takes forever.
Auto-Hold as a critical driving feature which had a hardware button before took me (as an engineer) a whopping 10 minutes to find in the third page of a random submenu.
The voice control is located as a touch-not-press button at the outer edge of a steering wheel so when (not if) you accidentally touch it in narrow turns, the confused useless voice blasts full volume at you while you‘re in the most complex driving situation.
It‘s as nobody had driven or user tested their cars before.
And here I am, an early technology adopter of two decades, feeling like an old man yelling I want my hardware buttons back.
Touchscreens (or touch surfaces) should not be used for any kind of vehicle function. period.
If you need to take your eyes away from the road, it is a shit ui.
If you can't feel but have to look to see the result of your interaction, it is a shit design.
If you need to look at the center console and down, it is even worse.
There is only one reason to get rid of all the buttons and switches, and that is design. because "ape goes ohhhh!".
And that should not be a consideration that is prioritized over safety.
I'd add one more point specific to vehicle (or other safety-related) applications: if it keeps changing, it's shit. I shouldn't have to hunt around for where that control went today any more than I should have to hunt around for where it went the first time. That is why I think touchscreens with tactile feedback don't solve this problem, even though they're cool in general. That customizability is worthless because the controls shouldn't be changing anyway. Just put in real buttons, knobs, and so on.