This article strangely undersells the advantages of low tech. It's true that they're not better for everything, but they have advantages well beyond the basic things mentioned.
A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens.
A knob provides a richer communication path between your brain and the device. With touchscreens, you can basically just poke and swipe, with some unintuitive nuances like long press or multi-fingered gestures. With a knob, you're using separate muscles and so can associate muscle memory based on the size, texture, and granularity of "click" feedback as you turn. We also have the ability to finely modulate the rate of twisting something—compare that to tapping frantically on a touchscreen left/right icon to control a quantity.
Knobs don't share space in our muscle memory with buttons. To some extent, different knobs and different buttons are distinguishable too.
Physical sliders are good for fine-grained control, but are also good at just smashing them all the way to min or max. When I try that on a touchscreen control, it might not make it all the way to the extreme, or my angle is wrong (no physical constraint to keep my hand/finger in place!) and it doesn't register at all because I veered off of the control.
Even when I'm looking at the screen already, using a directional pad means I'll always gradually get further and further off until it stops registering. Either because my attention is on a different part of the screen, or because my fingers are in the way of seeing the displayed pad. Not a problem with a physical stick or knob.
A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens.
I gotta mention that I have a circa 2000 Japanese luxury car and the dials that control the stereo and the air conditioning are actually remarkably unpredictable. Turning the knob at all quickly will disorient the system and you can have a large increase in value or no-increase-at all (it seems to be an artifact of the knob changing a digital value). If you look carefully and move slowly they work but they essentially have all the drawbacks you describe with a touch screen - except you can't do something else entirely, thankfully. Obviously, better design would fix this so one does have to say "properly designed knobs are better".
That's a bad implementation. Implemented well, a radio volume dial allows for predictable fine- and coarse-grained control. All of my cars have had good volume knobs that respond instantly and predictably, but I'm not surprised that there are bad ones.
There are no good implementations of touch screen buttons. However, there are some good implementations of touch sliders though, particularly on some LG microwaves (which someone else also brought up[1]).
I've written about these microwaves previously on HN, so I'll just quote myself[2].
> Regarding microwave oven ergonomics, the best one I've seen doesn't have old-school dials, but a touch-sensitive slider bar. You may think this is bad, but it works very, very well. The front of the microwave has the time display, the time slider bar, and two buttons: stop/cancel and start/+30sec. Open the door and there are a few auto cook options and power level options. There is no number keypad at all; the slider bar gives you both very fine and coarse-grained control, depending on how fast you slide across it. It's all very intuitive, and I was very impressed with it.
I guess the "digital but with physical buttons" is the middleground. It still gives the designers the ability to mess around with acceleration curves that amplify fast movements, or to not sample the value fast enough to get coherent digital readings. I don't understand why they do this. As a university engineering student, I have a great love for linear systems, which usually is anything analogue. It makes everything easier.
For example, the focus ring of a consumer digital camera lens drives me nuts, it's practically impossible to do a pull focus reliably between two objects. If you do it a little faster or slower, it will be off, regardless of the travel distance. On the other hand, professional cinema lenses usually have actual mechanical focus wheels attached to ensure perfect reproducibility.
I agree! I could rant endlessly about all the bad physical interfaces I've used. My house is full of them. All the new appliances come with the flat buttons—are they capacitive or something?—they may or may not register when you press them, that often don't work when poked with a gloved elbow, etc. And dials like you describe that change random amounts or aren't debounced or whatever. There are probably more possible ways for physical things to go wrong than the small but common set of problems with touchscreens. It's more that they can go more right, too. (Or at least have their problems and benefits better matched to a task.)
So true. This is one reason why I really miss my Pebble watch with its physical buttons, which allowed me to perform a lot of operations by touch without looking (e.g., play/pause/forward/rewind for media control). In comparison, fiddling with the small touch screen of my Fitbit Versa is such a poor user experience.
Not to mention Pebble's "low-tech" screen was so clearly visible in direct sunlight, while I have problem clearly seeing the fancier screen of Fitbit when it's slightly bright outside.
> A knob provides a richer communication path between your brain and the device. With touchscreens, you can basically just poke and swipe, with some unintuitive nuances like long press or multi-fingered gestures. With a knob, you're using separate muscles and so can associate muscle memory based on the size, texture, and granularity of "click" feedback as you turn. We also have the ability to finely modulate the rate of twisting something—compare that to tapping frantically on a touchscreen left/right icon to control a quantity.
That gives me an idea, which I credit to you sfink. To make a product with knobs, buy knobs of slightly different makes with variations that feel slightly different, slightly different texture, different roughness, different give, despite being all of them supposedly the same jelly bean part. This helps muscle memory because despite appearing basically the same the muscles and spine know the difference right away, secretly.
What that means is for a 6-knob device you need 6 suppliers. What that means is there's room in the market for many companies, and less economies of scale, despite being formally a commodity. What that then means is there's more diversity in the marketplace, and more companies that can each stay afloat, competition is less cutthroat. The other thing that then means is American and Chinese companies can coexist in what is otherwise a bitter-fought market. In fact, one good way of getting subtly different knob feels is in fact making them in different countries with different regulatory environments dictating how not to make the knob.
And what that all means is we reduce the final stage of economies of scale--wars and empires.
I remember when my phone updated to Android 10 and soon after I received a call and, well, there's a video that shows pretty much exactly how things went:
I can't believe we're asking software developers to recreate the world on a screen. It's an incredible amount of work that never gets done, leaving us with unintuitive interfaces.
The amount of times when I swiped down from the top (to open the notification shade or whatever it is called now or to refresh the page), the UI shows pulling down the thing fully... and when backs off. I repeat the gesture, but again it goes all the way down and retracts back and nothing happens.
And of course when I don't need that, I just swipe down to go top of the page - it thinks what I actually want to refresh the page. Many comments were lost that way.
Or worse, those UI affordances may change over time. With the swipe down behavior you mentioned, on iOS, I used to just swipe down from the center of the top of the iPad to see the notification shade. A recent iOS behavior made it so swiping down from the center now causes the app window to be dragged. Ugh! Now I have to relearn to find a spot slightly to the right to pull down to view the shade.
Your post is really reassuring... I have all of these problems with touchscreens and find them almost unusable... yet I thought I was alone, because people seem to love them.
I think it goes to show how people are surprisingly willing to settle for sub par experiences. Nearly everyone in the united states use terrible paper mate pens that scratch and skip, and use composition notebooks with cover that looks like tv static, made of center-stapled tissue paper that don't open flat.
(If any of you are suffering from terrible stationary, I would recommend trying out Midori MD Paper notebooks or Rhodia Rhodiarama notebooks. Midori makes beautiful and functional notebooks with precision ruling that satisfies the engineer in me, and Rhodia uses luxurious Clairefontaine paper suitable for fountain pens and stuff)
I find it harder to accurately position a physical slider than a knob. The reason is pretty obvious once you realize which muscles are involved in each movement.
Well, it depends on the length/circumference. Knobs are usually more satisfying to tune, but faders are not only as precise, but give better visual feedback and you can move multiple at once.
I expect if lo-tek UI’s become a popular way to interface with software, it won’t be long before someone is codgering up a 3D printer to create baroque monstrosities. Like say a colicky knob that acts as a button in both push and pull directions with multiple different clicky depths, and slides.
That reminds me of many Asian web site UI’s: they’re very dense by some Western market standards because many Asian markets’ Internet users apparently want dense information transfer in their user experience, which seems to be eschewed by many current Western site designs.
Modern computers, GUIs, and even the TUI, provide flexibility for a device. They're good at manipulating many different types of information.
If you have something that is meant to do something very well and it is critical then it makes sense to have a machine with purpose built physical controls. Controls which enable you to manipulate that one critical type of information accurately and easily.
The dedicated machine with physical controls will have to be correct, complete, and durable. But it will always work better because the controls are designed for real human bodily movement. They become truly enmeshed in muscle memory. You know where a control is relative to the others. It's just different.
One reason I'm hanging on to my car for now. I prefer knobs and buttons. I can adjust my radio, ac, heat, defrost, etc without ever taking my eyes off the road.
Modern cars seem to be moving towards all controls on a touch screen somewhere. I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates.
Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.
My toyota Corolla has a touch screen for interacting with audio. It has the following delightful features:
- latency
- it has a boot procedure when you turn the car on. While this happens, the controls have quite substantial latency. However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio.
- there is a knob for adjusting volume, but it's still part of the same system as the rest of it. There is still substantial latency to this control, especially immediately upon turning the car on. However even a little latency here is really annoying, because one naturally adjusts volume via trial and error.
- if you've paired the car with your phone via Bluetooth, it immediately sends a message to your phone to start playing whatever audio was played most recently at whatever the current volume is. I wrote a tasker routine to intercept this, but an android patch a while back helpfully broke this and I haven't bothered fixing it.
All of this combines for a user experience dramatically worse than an aux cord. It's kind of spectacular in its terribleness. And this is an otherwise great car.
This is another benefit of truly analog manual controls: Memory. Used to be your stereo volume knob was just at a certain level; when you turned it on it was at that level. Now they're all software controlled. At least some stereo equipment maintains this paradigm but I'm with you on the phone volume as it's dictated by your phone and the volume for one device could be drastically different than another.
>>> "However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio."
Yeah. In the same boat and my wife like to play pranks when she uses the car. Turns the volume to max right before removing the key. When her phone is not found it defaults to radio. That "saved me" from having to drink my morning coffee in the office on more than one occasion + it's good training for the heart.
Edit: Forgot to mention that the volume knob is ignored until the system fully boots up and the audio starts as soon as you twist the key.
My VW Jetta has Apple Carplay and similar issues abound.
> it has a boot procedure when you turn the car on. While this happens, the controls have quite substantial latency.
I've got one better. Controls during bootup in my car are simply ignored, and the bootup duration for Carplay in particular is so bad that it makes the bluetooth delay seem acceptable.
> However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio.
This is ironic because I wish mine would start playing. There's no setting for playback behavior either. The only setting, in fact, is the ability to reorder and add/remove third-party apps.
Oh, worse still, sometimes audio doesn't play even when you manually select something. The UI will register it as playing but the audio doesn't come through. When this happens, you have to disconnect and reconnect your phone, which is dangerous in motion. It's a joke. It makes me wonder what the deal is, and I have no idea who to report the bug to.
> All of this combines for a user experience dramatically worse than an aux cord. It's kind of spectacular in its terribleness. And this is an otherwise great car.
Yup. My beater in college that came with some random aftermarket radio was better. Carplay is pretty but beyond that it feels like an afterthought as an experience.
The wild variability in boot times for the entertainment center is what gets me. Sometimes, my bluetooth will start playing immediately, other times the car company's logo will grace the screen for a good 30 seconds before I can interact with it at all. There doesn't seem to be any relation to frequency of starting it up, time since the last drive, etc.
Hah our Subaru does this where it defaults to playing the radio at some volume whenever you “boot up” the car. I’ve got no idea what station is selected as the boot up station but every time I turn on our car it plays static.
How about no sound? How about defaulting to silence? Nope…
I understand your critics against touchscreens and they are justified. Your car doesn’t have a good touchscreen interface from what you say and also from my experience when I drove the corollas from the car pool. However it’s not because many cars are bad that the technology is bad.
A touchscreen from an 20 years old Archos MP3 player is extremely bad while an iPad Pro M1 is very good.
> I suppose this allows for more frequent updates, but in my experience it just leads to more bugs and more painful factory updates.
What is allows for is: cost cutting. Not having to install a mask, a button, wire harness and QA everything is a massive manufacturing cost saving. It speeds up production and lowers the amount of components that need to be sourced, installed and later made available for replacement as part of a service.
This is the same situation as with Electron apps - the savings aren't for YOU the USER, the savings are for person MAKING the thing. They get all the benefit at the cost of your user experience.
> What is allows for is: cost cutting. Not having to install a mask, a button, wire harness and QA everything is a massive manufacturing cost saving. It speeds up production and lowers the amount of components that need to be sourced, installed and later made available for replacement as part of a service.
I tend to have the same opinion, but at the same time I'm not convinced:
- I bought 1 year ago a new car for 80k $ => that's not cheap and in my opinion putting 4 extra buttons (up/down) or 2 extra knobs to control the temperature of the two front seats wouldn't have been an incredible engineering challenge that would have added hundreds of $ to the cost (which was anyway high).
- we have ~100 buttons that all work reliably on our keyboards, which are connected to our PCs/notebooks with just a single cable => I admit that in a car there is the extra challenge of temperature variance (car parked in the Sahara or somewhere in Iceland), but I cannot think that that's an engineering wonder (worked fine during the last 100 years).
Therefore maybe the trend is driven by designers: make everything shiny & slick, risk of having the own work thrown into the trash when taking a step back to do usability tests vs. physical controls so let's just forget about that.
>> This is the same situation as with Electron apps - the savings aren't for YOU the USER, the savings are for person MAKING the thing. They get all the benefit at the cost of your user experience.
I hate Electron as much as the next average HN user, but isn't the benefit of Electron actually kinda for the user as well as the developer, in the sense that Electron is basically a one-stop shop for porting to other platforms?
For instance, Microsoft Teams is written in Electron. This means the application is pretty damn well identical whether users within my company are using Windows or Mac computers. There are advantages to that.
I'd say for myself, Unity is a great example of where, basically; if I went 'native', I would really only be supporting one platform, like I used to when I did game dev in the late 90's and early 00's. But Unity gives me the power to flip a switch, and then all my friends can play pretty much the same copy of my game on any platform of their choosing.
It also means if there are bugs on one platform, they usually show up on another as well; making QE and addressing bugs a little bit easier, making for a better user experience.
Not a fan of Electron, just saying that there are benefits to the user for using such a system.
Yep, it also gives a rather encompassing single failure point that will be very hard to replace and very expensive >10 years. Possibly more than the car is even worth at that point in time.
But it's not cheaper. And the car companies make money off aftermarket parts. QA just moves to software, so you're not saving anything there either. Plus so far, screens are less reliable than analog controls, so instead of replacing a cheap knob, you're replacing a top quality screen with special manufacturing requirements due to the environment of the car cabin.
The touch screens are the only thing keeping me on dino juice cars. I want to go electric, but they all have these awful touchscreens! I don’t want to navigate a menu to change the temperature or turn on a seat warmer.
I’m just not buying an EV until there’s one that doesn’t rely on a giant touch screen for everything or I can’t buy an ICE vehicle anymore.
I think that's true only as long as the only electric cars you have driven are Teslas. The BMW i3 has pretty much resisted this tendency. Ok, it's already a pretty old design at this point and getting phased out, but it has lots of physical buttons (even for the seat warmer!). And I don't think electric cars that are variants of existing petrol cars (which are more and more common) will eliminate the physical controls just because they put an electric engine into the car. Or, otherwise said: if you buy an electric car from a tech company (or somebody trying too hard to emulate them), you get a touchscreen. If you buy an electric car from a car company, you get physical controls...
My chevy bolt is a nice mix I find. It has physical buttons for: climate controls, cruise control, media volume, media channel, lane keep assist, sport mode, gear selection, park brake. There are also voice commands, which I use for selecting navigation destinations.
Touchscreen for other things: android auto, apple car play (which provide maps) and more complicated user settings (such as whether you want the lights to stay on after you turn off the car for a while)
In the US, all cars will have screens now of one sort or another. Laws were passed requiring the installation of backup cameras in all cars. So, you will never see a new car that doesn't come with a screen of some sort. And if it's going to be required to have a screen, they're not going to make it a single use only for backup cameras.
I really wonder if the possibility of updates alone can make software worse. Because you don't have to "get it right" on the first try. And the updates always contain something more than bug and security fixes, which often help keeping the quality of the experience low, despite fixed bugs.
All the smart TVs I ever had lasted a long long time physically, but after a couple years they invariably started being noticeable slower than when I bought. The same happened to a guitar effects unit I had: changing patches became somewhat slower after update. And the battery of a wireless guitar transmitter I had now only lasts half the time it used to after the update. I honestly can say I dread updating almost any software today.
> I really wonder if the possibility of updates alone can make software worse.
Absolutely does. You see this in console video games. As soon as online updates became possible, game-breaking bugs at launch became practically the norm, instead of incredibly rare (minor bugs were common enough before ["I AM ERROR"], sure, but game-breaking ones, while not unheard of, were rare). Charging $60 for a late-alpha-quality product.
Yes. It'll have more bugs to begin with because the software team has no hard deadline to meet. Then it'll accumulate more bugs over time as "features" are added (while existing bugs are ignored). Then after 2-4 years nobody will be working on it any more and within 6-8 years it may no longer function at all or it may have well known never-to-be-patched security holes.
I try to avoid buying tech that can be updated, and tech that can connect to the internet in general.
I purposely NEVER connect smart TVs to the internet for this reason. I'd like to get a "dumb" TV but the ones in the sizes I'd like are prohibitively expensive.
Its not just touch screens vs physical controls. Far to many of the recent cars with buttons are designed by people who apparently never drove the automobile in question. For example, AC fan controls were in the past simple sliders, or knobs, you could crank it to max when one enters a hot car, then put it at the 25% (or whatever speed) without taking your eyes off the road, in a matter of a fraction of a second placing, what was usually a unique control, in a particular position.
These days the digitization of everything means that modern cars with physical controls usually have up/down buttons to change the fan speed or temp. So like the Ford Flex I rented recently, you can't tell from touching the physical control whether the fan is at max speed, so the sequence is, look on the console for the right button (because there are were a half dozen or so identical buttons next to each other), hold it down, while listening to the fan speed until it sounds like its stopped getting faster. Then when you want to slow down, one has to look/feel for the button, hold it for a second or two until it seems to be roughly at the right speed, try not to over/unershoot because its laggy/etc.
Some of this is the result of climate controls designed to hold a given temp rather than setting the fan speed directly, where the assumption is the fan will run at max until it reaches it set point. But that is annoying in a whole other set of cases, including the one where the car isn't doing a good job of circulating the air causing a hotspot on the sunny side/etc. On my wife's car I find myself pushing the climate controls to max cool when I get in because its trying to run in "silent" mode, or waiting for the AC to come up to full pressure and I want it to cool down faster, then I have to look at the controls to reset it back to something reasonable when it finally starts to reach a comfortable temp.
I have grown to heavily dislike the whole smartify everything.
Haptic feedback is a core part of how humans process the world, and to remove it in favor of more frequent updates seems like a naive decision at best.
Flatness in phones works because we can use our full attention - which is also why car accidents happen when people use it while driving.
> Flatness in phones works because we can use our full attention
I very much agree with you, and would like to add that flatness in phones is a feature because today phones are pocket computers, and computers should be able to provide any arbitrary UI to function as such. Cars on the other hand are not a computer nor are they intended to function as one.
The fact that modern cars expose part of their on-board computer to the driver is no excuse to treat any capability that may be handled by said computer as something exclusively accessible via a touchscreen UI, especially when its something that is expected to be interacted with while driving (audio playback control, climate control, windscreen wipers, etc.). A touchscreen is fine for features that should not be done while driving and did not exist or were not easily accessible prior to the ubiquity of touchscreens in cars. For all intents and purposes those are computer features. However, subjecting anything that was previously available via mechanical interaction to it is an unacceptable regression.
I did a car stereo design question during a job interview once. "Design your ideal car stereo" was the prompt. I said that all I wanted was a bluetooth button and a volume knob. They pressed me for details, and I said the volume knob needed to have a minimum and maximum threshold. I guess that worked, because I got the job.
I ended up giving this exercise to a lot of candidates. About 30% said they would project the UI onto the windshield.
I actually test drove a car last year that projected the speedometer onto the windshield in an attempt to make it look like it was overlaying the road. It was terrible! Before even leaving the parking lot I clarified with the sales rep that this "feature" was optional, because there was no way I was buying a car with it.
I also imagine this trend is bad from the ergonomics / RSI perspective. For generations, we've been using various kinds of per-appliance controls, with various shapes, sizes and stiffnesses. Since the past 10 years almost all of them have been replaced by a flat piece of glass. People are increasingly doing only a couple of motions with their hands throughout the day without any variety (tap/drag without any tactile feedback).
Agree! The fine sensitive movements of fingers (or better, lack of movement) that are required by touch screens can become very annoying. No possibility to rest your finger on a button. Accidentally touching somewhere else in the UI. Et cetera. These kinds of things are small, but add up pretty quickly in a world getting filled with capacitive touch screens.
I recall a Car Talk episode many years ago where the discussion about BMW’s big knob for multiple functions was filled with negative statements. Tactile feedback and navigation were issues.
I don't consider more frequent updates to be a good thing, either. Yes, of course, I want things to be fixed if they're broken. But when automakers take the route of smartphone apps, where they're updating once a month or more, changing UI, moving things around, adding unnecessary features, it's really not what I want in a car. I don't want touch screen control at all, but if I must have it, I REALLY want the UI to stay the same and the controls to stay in the same place. I don't want some random over the air update to be able to break what little muscle memory I might have built up to use the touch screen interface effectively.
Totally agree. Despite the move to touchscreens in cars over the years - they're acually terrible for usability and safety. The lack of tactile feedback and the fact that buttons can move position and appearance from app-to-app means that they require much more cognitive load than physical buttons.
Putting a trimmed-down Android tablet into a car is cheaper for manufacturers, but it's bad for usability.
There's been some research done that finds touchscreens are more distracting than drink or drug driving:
Yeah I hate this. Part of the reason I do not like the interior of all Tesla vehicles. I test drove one and asked the salesmen what happens if the screen breaks - he told me that it actually happened to his Tesla and that because of parts shortages it took months and months to get it fixed. When this happens all you can do is drive the car and open and close the windows essentially - no sunroof, no AC, nothing.
It's more the case that Star Trek's lack of budget has driven the modern world in that direction, because that was clearly "the future."
Apparently they wanted the Apollo style space-age interfaces with all the knobs and switches. Just, they didn't have the budget, and paint was cheaper.
> According to Michael Okuda, original Star Trek art director Matt Jefferies had practically no budget. "He had to invent an inexpensive, but believable solution," he told Ars. "The spacecraft of the day, such as the Gemini capsules, were jammed full of toggle switches and gauges. If he had had the money to buy those things, the Enterprise would have looked a lot like that."
> What could be simpler to make than a flat surface with no knobs, buttons, switches, or other details? Okuda designed a user interface dominated large type and sweeping, curved rectangles. The style was first employed in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for the Enterprise-A, and came to be referred to as "okudagrams." The graphics could be created on transparent colored sheets very cheaply, though as ST:TNG progressed, control panels increasingly used video panels or added post-production animations.
Well, TNG-era and afterwards at least. The original series was all knobs and buttons.
(Aside, in the novels they came up with a reason for this: During the Earth-Romulan war they had to go partially low-tech to avoid the Romulan telecapture technology, a technology they'd just developed to remotely hack into and control enemy starships. Apparently the design kept for ~100 years up through TOS when they finally learned more about the Romulans.)
Cadillac driver here (2021 model). I believe it's one of the very few new vehicles that have a physical button for every feature. Granted there is a lot of buttons, it's very nice you don't even have to use the touchscreen ever if you don't want. I theorize this could be due to the age demographic of majority of their buyers, that they have retained all physical buttons.
IMO the UI preferences of people (yeah, often older people) who are bad with technology are often the best for most folks—the rest of us have just learned to work through the pain of other interfaces, rather than demanding better. Most of the stuff they don't like slows down or confuses me, too, it's just not a show-stopper because I know how to get past it.
We have a PHEV from Chevy (the Volt) and it has the best dashboard ever. Knobs for the stuff you want (A/C, Volume, Skip, etc.) And touchscreen for the stuff you don't (GPS, Apple/Android Auto, etc.)
> using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving
I've read this argument again and again but I wonder: How often do you people change the temperature in your car? Mine is set to 21°C since two years, never felt the need to change it.
Multiple times a year, mostly in late spring and autumn, and that's infrequent compared to some people I know.
People use cars differently. Your experience may not be universal just because it is consistent. Besides individual variation people also differ in whether and how many passengers they regularly transport and how many drivers share the car (e.g. my wife and I share one car and often drive together).
License agreement screens to use a vehicle you have purchased. I despair that our profession has brought this to fruition. Plus, 'features' locked behind pay walls. Crazy town.
This is where I think regulation works, to a degree. Most states in the US already ban using handheld devices in a non-hands free capacity (which excludes almost every usage except for navigation and voice-activated messaging and calling), and this should also apply to auto manufacturers with regards to touchscreens in cars. The liability would rest with the manufacturers, since they are the ones installing the touch screens and requiring drivers use them.
Screens are not the real issue. The real issue is whether you have to look at it to set it.
There are annoying devices which have a very small number of tactile buttons, and overload them with multiple functions. Monitors, watches, and clocks tend to be especially bad, because the user interface is not used much. So you get some tiny unlabeled buttons, and have to consult the manual to find out when you need a short press, a long press, a press and hold, a two button press, or a paper clip.
Another class of annoying devices is point of sale systems. Some say they're ready for your card but really aren't - the store's system and the credit card terminal are not sufficiently aware of each other's state. Some have a RFID sensor, but it's not clear where the sensor is. Or when it's listening. Some are just really slow. Probably because they're doing too much in a busy "cloud".
However, POS systems do work better today. I haven't had a transaction totally fail to be completed in several years.
I'm thinking some manufacturers might be catching on to the downsides of touchscreen controls. I did a test drive of the previous generation Honda Civic, and it had touchscreen climate controls. I wound up getting a 2022 Honda Civic which has physical dials for all climate controls.
Though, as an aside, dials for temperature and fan speed are fine, but they also use a dial for changing which vents the air comes out of, which makes no sense. Also, the dials rotate infinitely, even though the ranges are finite. It means I still have to look to see what the setting is at, instead of being able to tell by feel.
> Though, as an aside, dials for temperature and fan speed are fine, but they also use a dial for changing which vents the air comes out of, which makes no sense. Also, the dials rotate infinitely, even though the ranges are finite. It means I still have to look to see what the setting is at, instead of being able to tell by feel.
Yikes. I know I'm just a nobody on the internet, but if I worked at Honda in any position of power, I would do everything in my power to get the people responsible for rubber-stamping this fired.
>Modern cars seem to be moving towards all controls on a touch screen somewhere
They aren't. Your car may be a poorly designed exception.
The things you need to use need to do while driving can usually be done with controls on the steering wheel.
If you need visual feedback while using your steering wheel controls you can glance at the dashboard screen.
>using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road
Your car is poorly designed. You can adjust the temp on MANY new cars without the touch screen with simple up down buttons and very clear temperature with its own always on display.
I wonder if there's a list somewhere of "dumb things you need to check when looking into a new car"? Most of these issues are things that are hard to notice ahead of time or during a test drive so it's kind of extra worrying to me.
Agreed. I feel people should start replacing touchscreens with physical buttons/dials with small LED screens on them --- their functions and behaviours can be programmed to change on demand while retaining tactile feedbacks.
>Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.
I understand this concern and opinion. I just wish that people who had this opinion realized that their car has a very modern voice interface that can reliably understand commands for temperature changes.
I know, I know, it's not the buttons you're used to, and these systems used to be very bad. But give it a shot sometime. I was impressed with Tesla's implementation, and I imagine the rest of the industry has caught up too. The best part is, it's the safest method of all, because it doesn't require taking either your hands or your eyes off the road. So if safety is your jam (and it ought to be!), this is really the best solution.
> voice interface that can reliably understand commands for temperature changes.
Unless...
- The radio is playing.
- The windows are open.
- You're driving in heavy wind/rain/hail pelting the car or other driving conditions making an awful racket.
- You don't drive a super expensive car, but one designed by marketing, bean counters, and summer interns.
- Other people in the car are talking/conversing.
- Other people in the car are sleeping (long road trips aren't uncommon for many).
- You have an accent.
- You don't speak a language supported by the car maker.
- You have a speech impediment.
- You have a physical disability preventing clear or any speech.
- A software update breaks the system.
So what exactly is the benefit of moving to touch screens / voice control? I'm pretty sure physical buttons and dials don't suffer from any of those problems except for maybe physical disabilities, but at least with physical buttons/switches/dials, you or a third party could modify and/or tie into them to suit the specific needs of the disabled driver. Good luck getting the auto makers to let you modify their software for a similar purpose. I just don't see the point in moving from something that works well in the vast majority of scenarios to something that works measurably less well, with virtual no real benefit. Fine if voice control is in addition to physical, tactile interfaces, but the trend toward replacement doesn't fill me joy.
In my opinion all voice interfaces I have used (with the exception of very especialized software like Dragon Naturally Speaking) seem to have terrible locale settings for anything other than American English.
So sure if you are willing to talk to your car like you're a CNN news anchor, then yes voice interfaces are great and far safer than touch screens.
I don't think it's as prevalent as you think. My partner's car interface is almost all touch, including the temperature controls, but there's no voice interface. Luckily, my vehicle has no touch interfaces at all and everything is much more reliable than their's, not even including the time when half their screen stopped responding to touch.
I haven't used Tesla's implementation, but I've suffered through Android Auto's voice controls. I've never had to retry a physical button four times because it needs a hearing aid.
I’ve never used a voice recognition app that can tell what I’m saying and I’m a native English speaker. I’m not about to start speaking differently to make an app happy
> I understand this concern and opinion. I just wish that people who had this opinion realized that their car has a very modern voice interface that can reliably understand commands for temperature changes.
Very new, expensive cars, sure.
Meanwhile, most cars are shifting at least some controls to touch, because they have to have a big screen anyway (backup camera requirements).
More bugs definitely, but car manufacturers put so much effort into QA for the essential features that they really just short on never are released broken.
Changing the temperature while driving on a good touch interface is trivial and incredibly far from incredibly dangerous. Besides with CC systems nowadays people look at the set temperature just as often. More advanced features like toggling internal air circulation do require a peek, but so do the buttons on most classical cars where you have multiple buttons in a row with unlit icons.
I still prefer buttons for the tactile feel and feedback, but the downsides you listed are pretty much made up.
The great benefit of a touch screen is unlimited update capabilities. It seems absurd to me that there are still cars rolling off the factory line that have unupdatable software in 2022. Your car is basically outdated and replaceable by something better within a year. That’s great for the manufacturers, but not for the customer. Compare that to a 3+ year old Tesla which works almost as good as a brand new one despite big upgrades to their internals, largely thanks to regular updates.
A 3+ year old car still working as intended is an extremely low bar for a car.
A car from the 70s, with proper care, would still work today just as well as it did when it was brand new.
In my view, a car should only require software updates in very rare circumstances. It should come with hardware and corresponding software that is fit for purpose and works. Most definitely I do not ever want any over-the-air updates. Requiring updates is a sign that the software was not properly engineered in the first place. I do not want that in my car.
If, for example, we are talking about upgrading the entertainment system, then it should just be made modular, like it used to be. Want to get an improved entertainment system with a better screen / better navigation system etc.? Take the old one out and install a new one. But the old one must keep working as well as on day one 20 years in the future, without any required software updates, even if the manufacturer goes bankrupt.
I still prefer buttons for the tactile feel and feedback, but the downsides you listed are pretty much made up.
Or, maybe your personal experience doesn’t translate to everyone, and touch controls are indeed dangerously distracting for most people. What we need here is evidence (user studies) and not anecdote, but anecdotally I can say operating a touch screen without looking at it directly is not something I’m capable of doing, even for things I use often.
> Changing the temperature while driving on a good touch interface is trivial and incredibly far from incredibly dangerous
Looking away for even ~3s at motorway speeds is 100m driven without looking at whats in front of you, I'd say that's fairly dangerous
> The great benefit of a touch screen is unlimited update capabilities
It also introduces a single point of failure for any features on it, at least with physical buttons you stand more chance of operating other parts of the car if one breaks.
I also find that many of these touchscreens are designed with California in mind. Sure, touchscreens are great when it's sunny and 22C. But when it's -25 and the car feels like a freezer, the touchscreen is sluggish and won't accepted gloved inputs, I start swearing and think about selling the car.
> The great benefit of a touch screen is unlimited update capabilities
You say this like it's a good thing. It's bad enough when apps get non-optional "updates" that make the experience worse. I don't want my car interface to go to shit because a designed wanted to add more padding to everything.
More realistically though, this means cars will stop getting updates after a few years but the remote access system will still be there providing a juicy attack surface for hackers.
Changing the temperature on a touch screen will always suck even the UI is completely modeless (imagine that!) On my car I can just press my hand against the console without looking and feel around for the controls. You can not do this with a touch screen no matter how good the interface is.
I feel like a lot of people have forgotten that before the iPhone, touchscreens were widely regarded as a terrible interface only suitable for niche applications like kiosks. There were good reasons for that, and latency and lack of tactile feedback were high on the list. Touchscreens have proved effective in situations where you need a highly-flexible interface in a small space, but an awful lot of devices (like appliances) have more space and don't need the flexibility, so they end up taking all of the downsides with none of the benefits.
A lot of designers (or marketers) seem to be trying to copy the look and feel of Apple devices without understanding the factors that led to their design.
Although I'm very much on the side of using more low-tech interfaces, it's important to remember that pre-iPhone touchscreens were a VERY different beast. Resistive touchscreens, in particular, were awful.
This is very true. Resistive touchscreens were slower, less reliable, and IIRC had coarser position sensing. Since we're talking about history, it's also worth noting that early opinions on touchscreens tended to assume they would be desk-mounted or wall-mounted, which leads to the gorilla arm problem.
Reminds me of modern stoves. All of them have touch controls which means every time a friend of mine is presenting me their new kitchen, I have no idea how to use the stove. They always say "No, no, it's really easy to get used to" but it's still frustrating because the touch controls never bring any new features to the table. They are just knobs abstracted into separated buttons and sliders, of which the latter you are not quite sure if you should drag them or just point to the wanted value. With a physical knob, the intuition of the laws of physics tells you how the knob can be turned.
They are easier to clean for sure but I can't believe the current "click this, slide that" UX is the best the manufacturers could come up with.
Having had one of these, I just want to say: “Never again.” Mine would turn itself on when you washed it and turn itself off when something splattered (like 50% of the time when I boiled water).
It made me wonder if anyone actually tested the damn design before approval for mass production.
My oven has touch controls on the front that are rendered useless as soon as I open it and heat/vapor is released onto the front panel. Luckily the touch interface is only for secondary features like setting timers, the important ones - temperature and mode selection - are physical knobs that can be pushed in flush with the front.
From my limited experience with touch operated stoves - these would be just as reliably operated by randomly throwing darts at a board.
On the other hand they are extremely easy to clean. Just get some cloth and ceramic stove cleaner and you're good to go.
The knobs are more convenient to operate, but they tend to accumulate grease in the joints and other parts where you cannot reach. And if you want to clean them thoroughly you need to disassemble the knobs and that's annoying as hell. For me being easier to clean compensates everything.
These ideas aren't born in the actual product design teams, where "don't put touch control near things that get hot" or "no unprotected touch controls on surfaces where spilling can occur" are not concepts that need to be explained. The way this usually happens is that product management hands down the requirement from down top, either on their own or after contracting some expensive industrial design agency (i.e. a mixed team of engineering and art majors who never had to sell, service and especially provide tech support for, any of the products whose outside they designed) to help "refresh" their product line.
Then, when in a shocking twist of events it's absolutely miserable, the tests are slightly mangled to highlight the usability gains ("easier to wipe", "looks modern and integrates well in a modern kitchen") and ensure no one's yearly bonus is endangered.
Surprisingly, it works out really well despite competition because everyone's doing it pretty similarly.
If your next question is "but why on Earth is it done like that!?", well, there are many reasons for that. But the tl;dr is that making kitchen appliances with universal, "boring" features, which last for 20 years, would spell disaster for a lot of companies in a lot of industries, from home appliances to furniture, and for smaller, specialized suppliers in these fields. The market has fine-tuned itself for frequently replaceable junk that's just good enough to that someone can plausibly say "well ackshually" when I refer to it as junk. Anything better would inherently result in much longer growth cycles, which Western management and stakeholders are not capable of handling anymore, and would disrupt "fashionable" trends, which would further prolong growth cycles in both home appliances and connected industries (furniture, home decor, cooking vessels believe it or not, and so on). It would also make it difficult to outsource mass production to cheap factories with poor quality control processes, thus driving prices up even more than the better materials and design would warrant, but that's more of a second-order effect than a cause by now.
Sauce: I used to work on consumer products years ago -- not kitchen appliances specifically but I know people who did those, too. Attending meetings was a lesson in cognitive dissonance and doublespeak and it's one of the least rewarding tech jobs you can imagine.
I think this is a safety function. You may not be able to turn off the stove yourself if something boils over, and the buttons get covered in hot liquid.
Haha that’s true! I am an electrical engineering student, if I have to guess it may be due to random electric charges, probably grounding was not done properly.
I despise touch controls in almost everything, from cars to home appliance, in my opinion the only reason they're replaced physical controls is because it's simply cheaper to make and people just got used to them because manufacturers convinced them through marketing "it's the future! be modern!". For example an induction hob at my wife's parents home - recently my mother-in-law couldn't turn it on because some cryptic key icon was flashing, I had to look into the manual to find out it's a children protection mode that is turned on and off by holding the key icon for 3 seconds, I didn't even know you can press it and it's so easy in general to accidentally press various things when cooking, sometimes you don't even notice that you have accidently changed the temperature.
You don't even have to touch them, water (even slightest amounts), metal, or anything like that can trigger a "press". It's like the thing hasn't even been field-tested in an actual kitchen.
Also home appliances love to use icons without any seeming standardisation. On one oven, the fan icon means fan assisted cooking and is basically the one you want 90% of the time, and then on another it means turn the fan on without applying heat. Also various half open rectangles with squiggly lines which may or may not have anything to do with grill modes depending on your specoific oven.
None of my friends say their stove touch buttons are great. They are not just unintuitive, most implementations are painfully slow.
(my own pet peeve though are microwaves - they are a positive monstrosity of horrible interface bearing no connection to actual typical usage. I'd like one with a massive "add 30s and start button", and anything else is a nice optional extra for me :-D
The best microwave I've ever used lived in the break room at my last job. It had one big knob, which worked like a standard kitchen timer: you would just twist it right until it pointed at the amount of time you want, then let it tick back down to the left until cooking was done. Want more? Just twist it right a little more, and let it keep ticking.
I have no idea why domestic microwaves come with a maze of buttons when such vastly superior knob technology exists.
Commercial heavy-duty microwaves and the cheapest plastic microwaves share the same interface: two dials. One is time, the other is power cycle. Sometimes it's just one dial for time.
Get a Whirlpool with Jet Start [1], it's a big-ish button that does exactly that. Easily the nunber 1 used button on our microwave (which, unfortunately, has loads more buttons).
A pretty good idea, I'm sure other manufacturers have the same but I don't know the marketing lingo.
Last time I had to buy a microwave, I intentionally sought out one with two knobs: time and power. It would be very hard to improve on the UX that provides.
I’m hopeful that we will see less and less gratuitous use of “hi-tech” UI in consumer electronics in the near future. It seems that many manufacturers still believe consumers think blinking LEDs and touchscreens and beeps and chromed plastic spaceship shapes are cool. Despite most of us using high resolution touchscreens many hours per day.
A good physical knob or button usually feels much more luxurious and expensive.
Everything seems to be done for looks rather than utility these days. Appliances have to 'look good' and 'fit' in the kitchen scheme. Knobs are apparently too 'protrudy'.
Says everyone on Linux with their ridiculous custom setup on an obscure window manager. The difference here being that you can change things to make them more comfortable and don't have to wait for some "designer" to have the idea first.
I've been using an induction stove for years now, and I still can't get over the fact that I don't have stepless control over the output power. When I have to keep something on a simmer, I'm continually adjusting the controls because keeping the pan on 2 will eventually get off the boil, and if I keep it on 3 it boils too hard.
Give me back my continuously-variable controls, please.
I was looking at new models lately and they have way more refined range, you could even do succesful bain-marie and butter caramel risk free of burning. Still don't know why they won't do a touch knob for quick actuation of the temperature (when you wanna make fry rice or things like that.)
My parents have one and I think it works really well. There is a physical power button, start button, as well as a physical knob. For the basic usage, you press power, turn the knob to select the mode, press start, then turn the knob to select your desired temperature.
No use of the touch screen for the basic flow. But if you want to do something else like start self cleaning or turn steaming on, you use the touchscreen rather than pull out a manual that tells you to press button 1, 3 and 4 for 4 seconds.
> the touch controls never bring any new features to the table.
1. Far easier to clean (you even mention this despite saying it brings no features...)
2. Easier for a lock function to help prevent kids/accidental turning on of the stove
3. Take up less space, makes the stove top a flush surface making it more reusable as a counter top
There are pros and cons to knobs vs capacitive buttons on a stove. In my kitchen I do not have a lot of spare counter space, so having the entire stove practically flush with the rest of the counter with absolutely nothing protruding is a big positive feature to me. I've never personally encountered any misunderstandings of the on/off or up/down buttons, and I've never had issues with boil overs or something triggering buttons unwantingly or been unable to make adjustments while cooking. So for me, the flush capacitive buttons are a huge selling point; having knobs would be worse in my use case.
On the other hand, literally last night the physical knob for one of my stove burners came off in my hand leaving me having to use a pair of pliers to turn it off. So, your mileage may vary.
I'd rather have some physical knob that I can use to turn something off, even if I have to bust out the pliers. Good luck shutting off some touch control that's on the fritz.
The stove at my parents place has some touch control to activate another heating ring(?). Not only is that hard to activate with wet or greasy fingers, but after a couple of years of use it keeps turning itself off now. Thank god that thing fails "closed" and does not (yet?) spontaneously activate effectively doubling the heating power.
I was at a friends' and they had touch buttons on the hotplate. Nothing really hard to understand, but it would not register touches with my index finger. After fighting, I figured I would try to use my thumb and that worked.
One vote for the physical buttons. If you want to act quickly, tactile buttons are really annoying.
The worst model of this i used only had a single set of + and - buttons. Then a single selector-button for which area of the stove you wanted them to control.
Have fun cooking with 2 zones, any time you need to adjust the heat of the next zone you need to press select 3 times to circle the whole stove and then adjust several times with plus or minus. Add the mandatory touch-delay to each action and by the time you reach desired temperature your food is burnt already. How can anyone think this is a good idea?!
Cleaning is what I spend far more time doing with a stove, and is more important, then the very brief period I'm involved in setting the temperature during cooking.
In my experience they’re not great for cleaning. They get confused when they get wet and start blinking and beeping and turning things on and off randomly. A set of well-designed physical dials could be made in a way that’s easier to keep clean.
The place where I feel this the most is cars.
I drove a Tesla Model 3 that belongs to a friend and had used a rented VW Golf mark 8. The touch screen and touch sensitive panels with haptic feedback were horrible. I now appreciate my VW Golf Mark 7 even more. It is glorious to have knobs, physical buttons, and levers for all things that needs to be controlled while driving. It's intuitive, and I can use them without looking at them(taking attention off of the road). I wish and hope that a modern car gets this "old fashioned" interface when I am in the market for a new car in a few years.
Touchscreens look great on spec sheets and to those who buy them, not necessarily to those who have to use them.
And those that buy them are loathe to admit they suck until after they've sold it off (because admitting it sucks means admitting you made a bad purchase).
It can go both ways of course. The first edition of Norman’s classic ‘design of everyday things’ was 1988, and it’s interesting to read that book today and see how a lot of the hard problems he was discussing were completely solved by the advent of touchscreen interfaces (specifically, the ability to reconfigure the interface according to what tasks are relevant at that moment). Done right, touchscreens are a huge boon for usability (I mean, look at what the iphone did). Done poorly they’re a disaster, but that’s been true forever with UI design regardless of the tools at hand.
(I haven’t read the revised edition (2013) of Norman’s book, I guess he must address touchscreens)
What are the examples of touchscreens done right besides the iPhone which is also on a UX downhill since, probably iPhone 4 or 5 era?
Cars? Motherfucking abysmal.
ATMs? How many times we tried to press a button realizing you're missing it completely because there's a 3-inch think screen?
Laptops? Only those who like fingerprints.
Cameras? I think if you are seriously using it, you prefer tactile.
Signature pads? This should not even exist.
Vending machines? I think they're more confusing with buttons jumping on screen and changing their labels than without.
Handheld video games? Still rely on buttons.
I wish designers would not try to stick them in everything. They're only good for small handheld devices to cram lots of functions in, and they're always a UX compromise. They can only improve the number of functions you can squeeze in a device.
What these have in common is that they are touchscreens. I can't think of a case of something else which just happens to have a touchscreen where I wouldn't prefer some other interface.
I prefer devices with qwerty to be honest, and if you already have a qwerty input plus sensor "joystick" w/ pressable button under it - I am talking about Blackberry - you quickly realize that you don't need sensor input except of for apps w/o proper support of joystick and webpages w/ GDPR.
> Signature pads? This should not even exist.
Drawing pads?
> I wish designers would not try to stick them in everything.
I wish designers and MARKETINGers stop to place them in anything, except of mentioned higher.
> Vending machines? I think they're more confusing with buttons jumping on screen and changing their labels than without
I have a vending machine from Porsche auto salon and buttons doesn't jump. Sensor is needed for adding kind of luxury mood if you already have a display which is needed for jumping Porsche logo.
>a lot of the hard problems he was discussing were completely solved by the advent of touchscreen interfaces (specifically, the ability to reconfigure the interface according to what tasks are relevant at that moment). Done right, touchscreens are a huge boon for usability (I mean, look at what the iphone did).
Eh, reconfigurability and dynamic interfaces are great for developers because it allows you to change things later and fix mistakes. Context sensitive UIs assume my brain can switch spatial contexts as well and for some interfaces, context switches are expensive on my brain. I want to rely more on muscle memory so I can focus on higher cognitive tasks, I don't want my UI to be one of those higher cognitive tasks.
Touch interfaces have their place but too many fall prey to the allure of sexy and try to slap it on every problem. On phones it ultimatelt makes sense, even there jumping between apps and updates on apps I find myself spending time figuring out interfaces far more than I should need to. This hurts usability more than helps it. I understand the goal is typi ally continuous improvement but I wonder for how many the goal is simply continous new shiny
> During the recent home device project I mentioned earlier, one of the biggest supporters of a touchscreen-based solution was the team’s marketing specialist.
I don't buy it tbh. Most home appliances are sufficiently complex that physical buttons are not intuitive. Ask someone to change the clock on their oven vs on their phone. Most could do it on the phone but not the oven. And there are countless more practical examples of this issue.
My Breville coffee machine only has buttons and knobs, which works fine for the basic flow since everything has a dedicated button. But once you want to do something like run a cleaning cycle you will have to read the manual every time because there is nothing intuitive about holding double shot + single shot and then power for 3 seconds. Or holding program and then power to open temperature adjust then clicking one of the buttons to set a temp which isn't labeled and needs the manual to decipher.
While on the touch screen model, the basic flow might be slightly less nice, but the most complex flows are also reduced to about the same complexity and can be intuitively worked out while using the device. Combining physical buttons for basic flow with a touch screen is the best of both imo. I have used some ovens which use a normal knob like it would on an older oven, but if you want to do something like start a self clean cycle or adjust steaming, its done via the touch screen.
it's really easy. grab the clock. turn the hands to the desired position. optionally wind it up. put back on the oven.
the only thing i dont understand why would anybody put his clock on the oven?
> Combining physical buttons for basic flow with a touch screen is the best of both imo
This. But if I have to choose, then I'll have physical buttons over a touch screen. Why? Because I use the "basic flow" every damn day. Whereas I only need to set the clock every few months.
> Ask someone to change the clock on their oven vs on their phone. Most could do it on the phone but not the oven.
I'd argue that's not an example of touch screens being better than buttons but rather the button interface in question being poorly laid out, and as for the phone, it's not the lack of physical buttons but rather the on-screen guidance that makes life easier. My grandparents' cooker is a button-free wonder and I couldn't work it out the first time I tried to turn it on.
If one is going to go into the effort and cost to put an SoC onboard that can run a touchscreen, one should just have the device communicate with the touchscreen computer in your pocket instead.
Common basic functions: knobs dials switches.
Extended functions: there's an app for that, or suffer through modal button changes like you describe.
Save on BOM costs, less points of failure, and does not require an SoC with display controller and a software stack running a (usually janky and slow and non-standard) UI.
The most important lesson I learned in engineering school: define the problem then look for a solution.
Most people have a solution in mind before they even look at the problem, and that solution is usually "build an app", or "slap a screen on it". With bureaucracy, it's "put the form on the internet".
There are a few low tech devices I much prefer:
- A kitchen timer vs. my phone. I don't need to unlock the phone and navigate to the timer app. I just twist the knob until I see the desired number. Hell, it's probably set to 3 minutes already, because I mostly use it to make tea.
- My microwave has one knob for time, and one knob for intensity. Best microwave interface ever. It doesn't tell time, so I never need to adjust it. I had microwaves so complicated that I turned to social networks for help.
- Stoves. I refuse to buy a stove without knobs. I have hated every stove without knobs I've ever used. Touch-sensitive buttons don't work with oven mitts, but get triggered by a wet rag, steam and spilled spaghetti sauce.
- Car infotainment. Each knob controls one thing. It's always in the same place, and I can find it while keeping my eyes on the road.
- Wired audio. This device is paired to the device it's physically connected to.
We got a new fancy coffee machine at work. Obviously with a big shiny touch screen attached. Best case, it requires 3 touch actions to get a standard coffee. One modal to select drink, one modal to select strength, one modal to confirm start. Some times, even more if it went into presentation mode where it brags about how good coffee it produces, requiring yet another touch to dismiss.
The old model. One physical button for coffee, one for cappuccino, one for espresso, one for tea water. Single press instantly gives you want you want. For more custom mixes you can optionally change the strength with another button on top before making your choice.
How is this progress? I don't want "engagement" with my coffee machine. I just want it to give me coffee with as little effort as possible. It's exactly like you say, someone was given the task to solve a coffee app, instead of looking at the actual problem first.
>Most people have a solution in mind before they even look at the problem, and that solution is usually
"put it on the blockchain"
But to your point, you're absolutely right. If you want to actually deliver valuable solutions, you need to have a good understanding of what unmet need you're trying to address. Otherwise you end up with a bad problem-solution match, and you waste everyone's time. Too often, technically minded people put too much emphasis on what's novel instead of what's valuable.
> My microwave has one knob for time, and one knob for intensity.
I don't think a knob is the optimal interface for time. In microwaves you need to input both low values of ~10s and very high values of ~600s with good precision on both cases. Sure, a logarithmic knob will give you that, but I don't think it's what you would expect.
For power it's good. It's even a much better interface for the power level than the usual. But then, anything is a much better interface than the usual microwave power level one.
> Wired audio. This device is paired to the device it's physically connected to.
There used to exist those wireless speakers with two pieces, one you physically connected to the audio output on the device, the other had the speaker. The transmission was analog and sucked due to noise, but it was much more reliable and had less lag than bluetooth.
For some reason, instead of fixing it into a digital transmission, everybody just stopped manufacturing the device.
I rarely need an exact amount of time. In fact I generally leave it with the door ajar and a few minutes on the timer.
Even then, a knob works perfectly. It does not need to set the value linearly. The first quarter of the timer could be 5 second increments, and the second half minutes.
>> My microwave has one knob for time, and one knob for intensity.
> I don't think a knob is the optimal interface for time. In microwaves you need to input both low values of ~10s and very high values of ~600s with good precision on both cases. Sure, a logarithmic knob will give you that, but I don't think it's what you would expect.
I definitely disagree. I had a stove once that had a perfect knob for setting time. The rate of increase/decrease was determined by the speed that you twisted it. Turn slowly for fine granularity, fast for large changes. I think it may have done something clever when you started fast and then slowed down (the natural thing to do), since I think the naive thing probably wouldn't work that well.
It felt *awesome*. It sounds silly, but it's been just over a decade and I still miss that control knob. I think about it every time I'm faced with the latest way of adjusting some quantity. It's definitely not just because it was a physical knob—plenty of physical knobs are irritating and only good for either small or large changes, or feel unpredictable, or don't have good tactile feedback (too smooth and too chunky are both bad).
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A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens.
A knob provides a richer communication path between your brain and the device. With touchscreens, you can basically just poke and swipe, with some unintuitive nuances like long press or multi-fingered gestures. With a knob, you're using separate muscles and so can associate muscle memory based on the size, texture, and granularity of "click" feedback as you turn. We also have the ability to finely modulate the rate of twisting something—compare that to tapping frantically on a touchscreen left/right icon to control a quantity.
Knobs don't share space in our muscle memory with buttons. To some extent, different knobs and different buttons are distinguishable too.
Physical sliders are good for fine-grained control, but are also good at just smashing them all the way to min or max. When I try that on a touchscreen control, it might not make it all the way to the extreme, or my angle is wrong (no physical constraint to keep my hand/finger in place!) and it doesn't register at all because I veered off of the control.
Even when I'm looking at the screen already, using a directional pad means I'll always gradually get further and further off until it stops registering. Either because my attention is on a different part of the screen, or because my fingers are in the way of seeing the displayed pad. Not a problem with a physical stick or knob.
A tactile button has far fewer accuracy issues with positioning: if you can feel the button, you won't start pressing 2/3 off and then get further and further off until you're triggering something else, as happens all the time on touchscreens.
I gotta mention that I have a circa 2000 Japanese luxury car and the dials that control the stereo and the air conditioning are actually remarkably unpredictable. Turning the knob at all quickly will disorient the system and you can have a large increase in value or no-increase-at all (it seems to be an artifact of the knob changing a digital value). If you look carefully and move slowly they work but they essentially have all the drawbacks you describe with a touch screen - except you can't do something else entirely, thankfully. Obviously, better design would fix this so one does have to say "properly designed knobs are better".
There are no good implementations of touch screen buttons. However, there are some good implementations of touch sliders though, particularly on some LG microwaves (which someone else also brought up[1]).
I've written about these microwaves previously on HN, so I'll just quote myself[2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31506358
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30873016
> Regarding microwave oven ergonomics, the best one I've seen doesn't have old-school dials, but a touch-sensitive slider bar. You may think this is bad, but it works very, very well. The front of the microwave has the time display, the time slider bar, and two buttons: stop/cancel and start/+30sec. Open the door and there are a few auto cook options and power level options. There is no number keypad at all; the slider bar gives you both very fine and coarse-grained control, depending on how fast you slide across it. It's all very intuitive, and I was very impressed with it.
For example, the focus ring of a consumer digital camera lens drives me nuts, it's practically impossible to do a pull focus reliably between two objects. If you do it a little faster or slower, it will be off, regardless of the travel distance. On the other hand, professional cinema lenses usually have actual mechanical focus wheels attached to ensure perfect reproducibility.
Not to mention Pebble's "low-tech" screen was so clearly visible in direct sunlight, while I have problem clearly seeing the fancier screen of Fitbit when it's slightly bright outside.
That gives me an idea, which I credit to you sfink. To make a product with knobs, buy knobs of slightly different makes with variations that feel slightly different, slightly different texture, different roughness, different give, despite being all of them supposedly the same jelly bean part. This helps muscle memory because despite appearing basically the same the muscles and spine know the difference right away, secretly.
What that means is for a 6-knob device you need 6 suppliers. What that means is there's room in the market for many companies, and less economies of scale, despite being formally a commodity. What that then means is there's more diversity in the marketplace, and more companies that can each stay afloat, competition is less cutthroat. The other thing that then means is American and Chinese companies can coexist in what is otherwise a bitter-fought market. In fact, one good way of getting subtly different knob feels is in fact making them in different countries with different regulatory environments dictating how not to make the knob.
And what that all means is we reduce the final stage of economies of scale--wars and empires.
https://youtu.be/UzpEHwZ-s-M?t=9
I can't believe we're asking software developers to recreate the world on a screen. It's an incredible amount of work that never gets done, leaving us with unintuitive interfaces.
The amount of times when I swiped down from the top (to open the notification shade or whatever it is called now or to refresh the page), the UI shows pulling down the thing fully... and when backs off. I repeat the gesture, but again it goes all the way down and retracts back and nothing happens.
And of course when I don't need that, I just swipe down to go top of the page - it thinks what I actually want to refresh the page. Many comments were lost that way.
(If any of you are suffering from terrible stationary, I would recommend trying out Midori MD Paper notebooks or Rhodia Rhodiarama notebooks. Midori makes beautiful and functional notebooks with precision ruling that satisfies the engineer in me, and Rhodia uses luxurious Clairefontaine paper suitable for fountain pens and stuff)
That reminds me of many Asian web site UI’s: they’re very dense by some Western market standards because many Asian markets’ Internet users apparently want dense information transfer in their user experience, which seems to be eschewed by many current Western site designs.
Modern computers, GUIs, and even the TUI, provide flexibility for a device. They're good at manipulating many different types of information.
If you have something that is meant to do something very well and it is critical then it makes sense to have a machine with purpose built physical controls. Controls which enable you to manipulate that one critical type of information accurately and easily.
The dedicated machine with physical controls will have to be correct, complete, and durable. But it will always work better because the controls are designed for real human bodily movement. They become truly enmeshed in muscle memory. You know where a control is relative to the others. It's just different.
Not to mention using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road.
- latency
- it has a boot procedure when you turn the car on. While this happens, the controls have quite substantial latency. However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio.
- there is a knob for adjusting volume, but it's still part of the same system as the rest of it. There is still substantial latency to this control, especially immediately upon turning the car on. However even a little latency here is really annoying, because one naturally adjusts volume via trial and error.
- if you've paired the car with your phone via Bluetooth, it immediately sends a message to your phone to start playing whatever audio was played most recently at whatever the current volume is. I wrote a tasker routine to intercept this, but an android patch a while back helpfully broke this and I haven't bothered fixing it.
All of this combines for a user experience dramatically worse than an aux cord. It's kind of spectacular in its terribleness. And this is an otherwise great car.
Yeah. In the same boat and my wife like to play pranks when she uses the car. Turns the volume to max right before removing the key. When her phone is not found it defaults to radio. That "saved me" from having to drink my morning coffee in the office on more than one occasion + it's good training for the heart.
Edit: Forgot to mention that the volume knob is ignored until the system fully boots up and the audio starts as soon as you twist the key.
> it has a boot procedure when you turn the car on. While this happens, the controls have quite substantial latency.
I've got one better. Controls during bootup in my car are simply ignored, and the bootup duration for Carplay in particular is so bad that it makes the bluetooth delay seem acceptable.
> However the first thing that happens is it begins playing audio.
This is ironic because I wish mine would start playing. There's no setting for playback behavior either. The only setting, in fact, is the ability to reorder and add/remove third-party apps.
Oh, worse still, sometimes audio doesn't play even when you manually select something. The UI will register it as playing but the audio doesn't come through. When this happens, you have to disconnect and reconnect your phone, which is dangerous in motion. It's a joke. It makes me wonder what the deal is, and I have no idea who to report the bug to.
> All of this combines for a user experience dramatically worse than an aux cord. It's kind of spectacular in its terribleness. And this is an otherwise great car.
Yup. My beater in college that came with some random aftermarket radio was better. Carplay is pretty but beyond that it feels like an afterthought as an experience.
How about no sound? How about defaulting to silence? Nope…
A touchscreen from an 20 years old Archos MP3 player is extremely bad while an iPad Pro M1 is very good.
What is allows for is: cost cutting. Not having to install a mask, a button, wire harness and QA everything is a massive manufacturing cost saving. It speeds up production and lowers the amount of components that need to be sourced, installed and later made available for replacement as part of a service.
This is the same situation as with Electron apps - the savings aren't for YOU the USER, the savings are for person MAKING the thing. They get all the benefit at the cost of your user experience.
I tend to have the same opinion, but at the same time I'm not convinced:
- I bought 1 year ago a new car for 80k $ => that's not cheap and in my opinion putting 4 extra buttons (up/down) or 2 extra knobs to control the temperature of the two front seats wouldn't have been an incredible engineering challenge that would have added hundreds of $ to the cost (which was anyway high).
- we have ~100 buttons that all work reliably on our keyboards, which are connected to our PCs/notebooks with just a single cable => I admit that in a car there is the extra challenge of temperature variance (car parked in the Sahara or somewhere in Iceland), but I cannot think that that's an engineering wonder (worked fine during the last 100 years).
Therefore maybe the trend is driven by designers: make everything shiny & slick, risk of having the own work thrown into the trash when taking a step back to do usability tests vs. physical controls so let's just forget about that.
I hate Electron as much as the next average HN user, but isn't the benefit of Electron actually kinda for the user as well as the developer, in the sense that Electron is basically a one-stop shop for porting to other platforms?
For instance, Microsoft Teams is written in Electron. This means the application is pretty damn well identical whether users within my company are using Windows or Mac computers. There are advantages to that.
I'd say for myself, Unity is a great example of where, basically; if I went 'native', I would really only be supporting one platform, like I used to when I did game dev in the late 90's and early 00's. But Unity gives me the power to flip a switch, and then all my friends can play pretty much the same copy of my game on any platform of their choosing.
It also means if there are bugs on one platform, they usually show up on another as well; making QE and addressing bugs a little bit easier, making for a better user experience.
Not a fan of Electron, just saying that there are benefits to the user for using such a system.
I’m just not buying an EV until there’s one that doesn’t rely on a giant touch screen for everything or I can’t buy an ICE vehicle anymore.
Touchscreen for other things: android auto, apple car play (which provide maps) and more complicated user settings (such as whether you want the lights to stay on after you turn off the car for a while)
That said, people I know have a strange resistance to using voice commands with their cars and phones.
All the smart TVs I ever had lasted a long long time physically, but after a couple years they invariably started being noticeable slower than when I bought. The same happened to a guitar effects unit I had: changing patches became somewhat slower after update. And the battery of a wireless guitar transmitter I had now only lasts half the time it used to after the update. I honestly can say I dread updating almost any software today.
Absolutely does. You see this in console video games. As soon as online updates became possible, game-breaking bugs at launch became practically the norm, instead of incredibly rare (minor bugs were common enough before ["I AM ERROR"], sure, but game-breaking ones, while not unheard of, were rare). Charging $60 for a late-alpha-quality product.
I try to avoid buying tech that can be updated, and tech that can connect to the internet in general.
Could this be a form of assisted obsolescence, in which a user who has owned a device for a few years is being subliminally urged to buy a new model?
These days the digitization of everything means that modern cars with physical controls usually have up/down buttons to change the fan speed or temp. So like the Ford Flex I rented recently, you can't tell from touching the physical control whether the fan is at max speed, so the sequence is, look on the console for the right button (because there are were a half dozen or so identical buttons next to each other), hold it down, while listening to the fan speed until it sounds like its stopped getting faster. Then when you want to slow down, one has to look/feel for the button, hold it for a second or two until it seems to be roughly at the right speed, try not to over/unershoot because its laggy/etc.
Some of this is the result of climate controls designed to hold a given temp rather than setting the fan speed directly, where the assumption is the fan will run at max until it reaches it set point. But that is annoying in a whole other set of cases, including the one where the car isn't doing a good job of circulating the air causing a hotspot on the sunny side/etc. On my wife's car I find myself pushing the climate controls to max cool when I get in because its trying to run in "silent" mode, or waiting for the AC to come up to full pressure and I want it to cool down faster, then I have to look at the controls to reset it back to something reasonable when it finally starts to reach a comfortable temp.
Haptic feedback is a core part of how humans process the world, and to remove it in favor of more frequent updates seems like a naive decision at best.
Flatness in phones works because we can use our full attention - which is also why car accidents happen when people use it while driving.
I very much agree with you, and would like to add that flatness in phones is a feature because today phones are pocket computers, and computers should be able to provide any arbitrary UI to function as such. Cars on the other hand are not a computer nor are they intended to function as one.
The fact that modern cars expose part of their on-board computer to the driver is no excuse to treat any capability that may be handled by said computer as something exclusively accessible via a touchscreen UI, especially when its something that is expected to be interacted with while driving (audio playback control, climate control, windscreen wipers, etc.). A touchscreen is fine for features that should not be done while driving and did not exist or were not easily accessible prior to the ubiquity of touchscreens in cars. For all intents and purposes those are computer features. However, subjecting anything that was previously available via mechanical interaction to it is an unacceptable regression.
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I ended up giving this exercise to a lot of candidates. About 30% said they would project the UI onto the windshield.
Putting a trimmed-down Android tablet into a car is cheaper for manufacturers, but it's bad for usability.
There's been some research done that finds touchscreens are more distracting than drink or drug driving:
https://www.ala.co.uk/connect/in-car-touchscreens-more-dange...
Apparently they wanted the Apollo style space-age interfaces with all the knobs and switches. Just, they didn't have the budget, and paint was cheaper.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/how-star-trek-artist...
> According to Michael Okuda, original Star Trek art director Matt Jefferies had practically no budget. "He had to invent an inexpensive, but believable solution," he told Ars. "The spacecraft of the day, such as the Gemini capsules, were jammed full of toggle switches and gauges. If he had had the money to buy those things, the Enterprise would have looked a lot like that."
> What could be simpler to make than a flat surface with no knobs, buttons, switches, or other details? Okuda designed a user interface dominated large type and sweeping, curved rectangles. The style was first employed in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for the Enterprise-A, and came to be referred to as "okudagrams." The graphics could be created on transparent colored sheets very cheaply, though as ST:TNG progressed, control panels increasingly used video panels or added post-production animations.
In the 32nd century, tho, they use programmable matter because people like tactile feedback, it turns out.
(Aside, in the novels they came up with a reason for this: During the Earth-Romulan war they had to go partially low-tech to avoid the Romulan telecapture technology, a technology they'd just developed to remotely hack into and control enemy starships. Apparently the design kept for ~100 years up through TOS when they finally learned more about the Romulans.)
I've read this argument again and again but I wonder: How often do you people change the temperature in your car? Mine is set to 21°C since two years, never felt the need to change it.
People use cars differently. Your experience may not be universal just because it is consistent. Besides individual variation people also differ in whether and how many passengers they regularly transport and how many drivers share the car (e.g. my wife and I share one car and often drive together).
In my cheap pickup I have to constantly adjust temperature and fan speed. In my old German "ultimate driving machine", it's set and forget.
Soon:
“You need to return the call from your mom before the car will start for home.” Etc.
There are annoying devices which have a very small number of tactile buttons, and overload them with multiple functions. Monitors, watches, and clocks tend to be especially bad, because the user interface is not used much. So you get some tiny unlabeled buttons, and have to consult the manual to find out when you need a short press, a long press, a press and hold, a two button press, or a paper clip.
Another class of annoying devices is point of sale systems. Some say they're ready for your card but really aren't - the store's system and the credit card terminal are not sufficiently aware of each other's state. Some have a RFID sensor, but it's not clear where the sensor is. Or when it's listening. Some are just really slow. Probably because they're doing too much in a busy "cloud". However, POS systems do work better today. I haven't had a transaction totally fail to be completed in several years.
Though, as an aside, dials for temperature and fan speed are fine, but they also use a dial for changing which vents the air comes out of, which makes no sense. Also, the dials rotate infinitely, even though the ranges are finite. It means I still have to look to see what the setting is at, instead of being able to tell by feel.
By comparison, the 1992 Honda Civic climate controls are way better: https://i.imgur.com/r8JjjNw.png
Yikes. I know I'm just a nobody on the internet, but if I worked at Honda in any position of power, I would do everything in my power to get the people responsible for rubber-stamping this fired.
This is unacceptable for a modern vehicle.
They aren't. Your car may be a poorly designed exception.
The things you need to use need to do while driving can usually be done with controls on the steering wheel.
If you need visual feedback while using your steering wheel controls you can glance at the dashboard screen.
>using a touchscreen to adjust the temperature while driving is incredibly dangerous compared to a dial you can feel for without taking your eyes off the road
Your car is poorly designed. You can adjust the temp on MANY new cars without the touch screen with simple up down buttons and very clear temperature with its own always on display.
I understand this concern and opinion. I just wish that people who had this opinion realized that their car has a very modern voice interface that can reliably understand commands for temperature changes.
I know, I know, it's not the buttons you're used to, and these systems used to be very bad. But give it a shot sometime. I was impressed with Tesla's implementation, and I imagine the rest of the industry has caught up too. The best part is, it's the safest method of all, because it doesn't require taking either your hands or your eyes off the road. So if safety is your jam (and it ought to be!), this is really the best solution.
Unless... - The radio is playing. - The windows are open. - You're driving in heavy wind/rain/hail pelting the car or other driving conditions making an awful racket. - You don't drive a super expensive car, but one designed by marketing, bean counters, and summer interns. - Other people in the car are talking/conversing. - Other people in the car are sleeping (long road trips aren't uncommon for many). - You have an accent. - You don't speak a language supported by the car maker. - You have a speech impediment. - You have a physical disability preventing clear or any speech. - A software update breaks the system.
So what exactly is the benefit of moving to touch screens / voice control? I'm pretty sure physical buttons and dials don't suffer from any of those problems except for maybe physical disabilities, but at least with physical buttons/switches/dials, you or a third party could modify and/or tie into them to suit the specific needs of the disabled driver. Good luck getting the auto makers to let you modify their software for a similar purpose. I just don't see the point in moving from something that works well in the vast majority of scenarios to something that works measurably less well, with virtual no real benefit. Fine if voice control is in addition to physical, tactile interfaces, but the trend toward replacement doesn't fill me joy.
Also, cue the skit about the thick scottish-accented guy trying to activate a voice-activated elevator...
Buttons, please. And only buttons.
So sure if you are willing to talk to your car like you're a CNN news anchor, then yes voice interfaces are great and far safer than touch screens.
Very new, expensive cars, sure.
Meanwhile, most cars are shifting at least some controls to touch, because they have to have a big screen anyway (backup camera requirements).
Changing the temperature while driving on a good touch interface is trivial and incredibly far from incredibly dangerous. Besides with CC systems nowadays people look at the set temperature just as often. More advanced features like toggling internal air circulation do require a peek, but so do the buttons on most classical cars where you have multiple buttons in a row with unlit icons.
I still prefer buttons for the tactile feel and feedback, but the downsides you listed are pretty much made up.
The great benefit of a touch screen is unlimited update capabilities. It seems absurd to me that there are still cars rolling off the factory line that have unupdatable software in 2022. Your car is basically outdated and replaceable by something better within a year. That’s great for the manufacturers, but not for the customer. Compare that to a 3+ year old Tesla which works almost as good as a brand new one despite big upgrades to their internals, largely thanks to regular updates.
A car from the 70s, with proper care, would still work today just as well as it did when it was brand new.
In my view, a car should only require software updates in very rare circumstances. It should come with hardware and corresponding software that is fit for purpose and works. Most definitely I do not ever want any over-the-air updates. Requiring updates is a sign that the software was not properly engineered in the first place. I do not want that in my car.
If, for example, we are talking about upgrading the entertainment system, then it should just be made modular, like it used to be. Want to get an improved entertainment system with a better screen / better navigation system etc.? Take the old one out and install a new one. But the old one must keep working as well as on day one 20 years in the future, without any required software updates, even if the manufacturer goes bankrupt.
Or, maybe your personal experience doesn’t translate to everyone, and touch controls are indeed dangerously distracting for most people. What we need here is evidence (user studies) and not anecdote, but anecdotally I can say operating a touch screen without looking at it directly is not something I’m capable of doing, even for things I use often.
Looking away for even ~3s at motorway speeds is 100m driven without looking at whats in front of you, I'd say that's fairly dangerous
> The great benefit of a touch screen is unlimited update capabilities
It also introduces a single point of failure for any features on it, at least with physical buttons you stand more chance of operating other parts of the car if one breaks.
You say this like it's a good thing. It's bad enough when apps get non-optional "updates" that make the experience worse. I don't want my car interface to go to shit because a designed wanted to add more padding to everything.
More realistically though, this means cars will stop getting updates after a few years but the remote access system will still be there providing a juicy attack surface for hackers.
A lot of designers (or marketers) seem to be trying to copy the look and feel of Apple devices without understanding the factors that led to their design.
I get why the trade off is worthwhile on smartphone.
But I hate the push in automotive application. Yes, I'd like a big screen for navigation, but don't replace HVAC controls.
It's not just about touch screen. There is overuse of capacitive buttons in cars. And it is all about dollars.
They are easier to clean for sure but I can't believe the current "click this, slide that" UX is the best the manufacturers could come up with.
It made me wonder if anyone actually tested the damn design before approval for mass production.
From my limited experience with touch operated stoves - these would be just as reliably operated by randomly throwing darts at a board.
The knobs are more convenient to operate, but they tend to accumulate grease in the joints and other parts where you cannot reach. And if you want to clean them thoroughly you need to disassemble the knobs and that's annoying as hell. For me being easier to clean compensates everything.
Then, when in a shocking twist of events it's absolutely miserable, the tests are slightly mangled to highlight the usability gains ("easier to wipe", "looks modern and integrates well in a modern kitchen") and ensure no one's yearly bonus is endangered.
Surprisingly, it works out really well despite competition because everyone's doing it pretty similarly.
If your next question is "but why on Earth is it done like that!?", well, there are many reasons for that. But the tl;dr is that making kitchen appliances with universal, "boring" features, which last for 20 years, would spell disaster for a lot of companies in a lot of industries, from home appliances to furniture, and for smaller, specialized suppliers in these fields. The market has fine-tuned itself for frequently replaceable junk that's just good enough to that someone can plausibly say "well ackshually" when I refer to it as junk. Anything better would inherently result in much longer growth cycles, which Western management and stakeholders are not capable of handling anymore, and would disrupt "fashionable" trends, which would further prolong growth cycles in both home appliances and connected industries (furniture, home decor, cooking vessels believe it or not, and so on). It would also make it difficult to outsource mass production to cheap factories with poor quality control processes, thus driving prices up even more than the better materials and design would warrant, but that's more of a second-order effect than a cause by now.
Sauce: I used to work on consumer products years ago -- not kitchen appliances specifically but I know people who did those, too. Attending meetings was a lesson in cognitive dissonance and doublespeak and it's one of the least rewarding tech jobs you can imagine.
(my own pet peeve though are microwaves - they are a positive monstrosity of horrible interface bearing no connection to actual typical usage. I'd like one with a massive "add 30s and start button", and anything else is a nice optional extra for me :-D
I have no idea why domestic microwaves come with a maze of buttons when such vastly superior knob technology exists.
A pretty good idea, I'm sure other manufacturers have the same but I don't know the marketing lingo.
[1]: https://www.manualslib.com/manual/972967/Whirlpool-Jt469.htm...
A good physical knob or button usually feels much more luxurious and expensive.
Says everyone on Linux with their ridiculous custom setup on an obscure window manager. The difference here being that you can change things to make them more comfortable and don't have to wait for some "designer" to have the idea first.
I've been using an induction stove for years now, and I still can't get over the fact that I don't have stepless control over the output power. When I have to keep something on a simmer, I'm continually adjusting the controls because keeping the pan on 2 will eventually get off the boil, and if I keep it on 3 it boils too hard.
Give me back my continuously-variable controls, please.
No use of the touch screen for the basic flow. But if you want to do something else like start self cleaning or turn steaming on, you use the touchscreen rather than pull out a manual that tells you to press button 1, 3 and 4 for 4 seconds.
1. Far easier to clean (you even mention this despite saying it brings no features...)
2. Easier for a lock function to help prevent kids/accidental turning on of the stove
3. Take up less space, makes the stove top a flush surface making it more reusable as a counter top
There are pros and cons to knobs vs capacitive buttons on a stove. In my kitchen I do not have a lot of spare counter space, so having the entire stove practically flush with the rest of the counter with absolutely nothing protruding is a big positive feature to me. I've never personally encountered any misunderstandings of the on/off or up/down buttons, and I've never had issues with boil overs or something triggering buttons unwantingly or been unable to make adjustments while cooking. So for me, the flush capacitive buttons are a huge selling point; having knobs would be worse in my use case.
The stove at my parents place has some touch control to activate another heating ring(?). Not only is that hard to activate with wet or greasy fingers, but after a couple of years of use it keeps turning itself off now. Thank god that thing fails "closed" and does not (yet?) spontaneously activate effectively doubling the heating power.
One vote for the physical buttons. If you want to act quickly, tactile buttons are really annoying.
I LOATH my current oven / cook top that has up and down push button arrows and a tiny screen that is pointed at my waist ...
Have fun cooking with 2 zones, any time you need to adjust the heat of the next zone you need to press select 3 times to circle the whole stove and then adjust several times with plus or minus. Add the mandatory touch-delay to each action and by the time you reach desired temperature your food is burnt already. How can anyone think this is a good idea?!
So it seems like a fairly good trade-off to me.
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And those that buy them are loathe to admit they suck until after they've sold it off (because admitting it sucks means admitting you made a bad purchase).
(I haven’t read the revised edition (2013) of Norman’s book, I guess he must address touchscreens)
Cars? Motherfucking abysmal. ATMs? How many times we tried to press a button realizing you're missing it completely because there's a 3-inch think screen? Laptops? Only those who like fingerprints. Cameras? I think if you are seriously using it, you prefer tactile. Signature pads? This should not even exist. Vending machines? I think they're more confusing with buttons jumping on screen and changing their labels than without. Handheld video games? Still rely on buttons.
I wish designers would not try to stick them in everything. They're only good for small handheld devices to cram lots of functions in, and they're always a UX compromise. They can only improve the number of functions you can squeeze in a device.
What these have in common is that they are touchscreens. I can't think of a case of something else which just happens to have a touchscreen where I wouldn't prefer some other interface.
I prefer devices with qwerty to be honest, and if you already have a qwerty input plus sensor "joystick" w/ pressable button under it - I am talking about Blackberry - you quickly realize that you don't need sensor input except of for apps w/o proper support of joystick and webpages w/ GDPR.
> Signature pads? This should not even exist.
Drawing pads?
> I wish designers would not try to stick them in everything.
I wish designers and MARKETINGers stop to place them in anything, except of mentioned higher.
> Vending machines? I think they're more confusing with buttons jumping on screen and changing their labels than without
I have a vending machine from Porsche auto salon and buttons doesn't jump. Sensor is needed for adding kind of luxury mood if you already have a display which is needed for jumping Porsche logo.
Eh, reconfigurability and dynamic interfaces are great for developers because it allows you to change things later and fix mistakes. Context sensitive UIs assume my brain can switch spatial contexts as well and for some interfaces, context switches are expensive on my brain. I want to rely more on muscle memory so I can focus on higher cognitive tasks, I don't want my UI to be one of those higher cognitive tasks.
Touch interfaces have their place but too many fall prey to the allure of sexy and try to slap it on every problem. On phones it ultimatelt makes sense, even there jumping between apps and updates on apps I find myself spending time figuring out interfaces far more than I should need to. This hurts usability more than helps it. I understand the goal is typi ally continuous improvement but I wonder for how many the goal is simply continous new shiny
Why am I not surprised?
My Breville coffee machine only has buttons and knobs, which works fine for the basic flow since everything has a dedicated button. But once you want to do something like run a cleaning cycle you will have to read the manual every time because there is nothing intuitive about holding double shot + single shot and then power for 3 seconds. Or holding program and then power to open temperature adjust then clicking one of the buttons to set a temp which isn't labeled and needs the manual to decipher.
While on the touch screen model, the basic flow might be slightly less nice, but the most complex flows are also reduced to about the same complexity and can be intuitively worked out while using the device. Combining physical buttons for basic flow with a touch screen is the best of both imo. I have used some ovens which use a normal knob like it would on an older oven, but if you want to do something like start a self clean cycle or adjust steaming, its done via the touch screen.
it's really easy. grab the clock. turn the hands to the desired position. optionally wind it up. put back on the oven. the only thing i dont understand why would anybody put his clock on the oven?
This. But if I have to choose, then I'll have physical buttons over a touch screen. Why? Because I use the "basic flow" every damn day. Whereas I only need to set the clock every few months.
I'd argue that's not an example of touch screens being better than buttons but rather the button interface in question being poorly laid out, and as for the phone, it's not the lack of physical buttons but rather the on-screen guidance that makes life easier. My grandparents' cooker is a button-free wonder and I couldn't work it out the first time I tried to turn it on.
Common basic functions: knobs dials switches.
Extended functions: there's an app for that, or suffer through modal button changes like you describe.
Save on BOM costs, less points of failure, and does not require an SoC with display controller and a software stack running a (usually janky and slow and non-standard) UI.
Helps to focus on the content. That's exactly what marketing dreads.
Most people have a solution in mind before they even look at the problem, and that solution is usually "build an app", or "slap a screen on it". With bureaucracy, it's "put the form on the internet".
There are a few low tech devices I much prefer:
- A kitchen timer vs. my phone. I don't need to unlock the phone and navigate to the timer app. I just twist the knob until I see the desired number. Hell, it's probably set to 3 minutes already, because I mostly use it to make tea.
- My microwave has one knob for time, and one knob for intensity. Best microwave interface ever. It doesn't tell time, so I never need to adjust it. I had microwaves so complicated that I turned to social networks for help.
- Stoves. I refuse to buy a stove without knobs. I have hated every stove without knobs I've ever used. Touch-sensitive buttons don't work with oven mitts, but get triggered by a wet rag, steam and spilled spaghetti sauce.
- Car infotainment. Each knob controls one thing. It's always in the same place, and I can find it while keeping my eyes on the road.
- Wired audio. This device is paired to the device it's physically connected to.
The old model. One physical button for coffee, one for cappuccino, one for espresso, one for tea water. Single press instantly gives you want you want. For more custom mixes you can optionally change the strength with another button on top before making your choice.
How is this progress? I don't want "engagement" with my coffee machine. I just want it to give me coffee with as little effort as possible. It's exactly like you say, someone was given the task to solve a coffee app, instead of looking at the actual problem first.
"put it on the blockchain"
But to your point, you're absolutely right. If you want to actually deliver valuable solutions, you need to have a good understanding of what unmet need you're trying to address. Otherwise you end up with a bad problem-solution match, and you waste everyone's time. Too often, technically minded people put too much emphasis on what's novel instead of what's valuable.
I don't think a knob is the optimal interface for time. In microwaves you need to input both low values of ~10s and very high values of ~600s with good precision on both cases. Sure, a logarithmic knob will give you that, but I don't think it's what you would expect.
For power it's good. It's even a much better interface for the power level than the usual. But then, anything is a much better interface than the usual microwave power level one.
> Wired audio. This device is paired to the device it's physically connected to.
There used to exist those wireless speakers with two pieces, one you physically connected to the audio output on the device, the other had the speaker. The transmission was analog and sucked due to noise, but it was much more reliable and had less lag than bluetooth.
For some reason, instead of fixing it into a digital transmission, everybody just stopped manufacturing the device.
Even then, a knob works perfectly. It does not need to set the value linearly. The first quarter of the timer could be 5 second increments, and the second half minutes.
> I don't think a knob is the optimal interface for time. In microwaves you need to input both low values of ~10s and very high values of ~600s with good precision on both cases. Sure, a logarithmic knob will give you that, but I don't think it's what you would expect.
I definitely disagree. I had a stove once that had a perfect knob for setting time. The rate of increase/decrease was determined by the speed that you twisted it. Turn slowly for fine granularity, fast for large changes. I think it may have done something clever when you started fast and then slowed down (the natural thing to do), since I think the naive thing probably wouldn't work that well.
It felt *awesome*. It sounds silly, but it's been just over a decade and I still miss that control knob. I think about it every time I'm faced with the latest way of adjusting some quantity. It's definitely not just because it was a physical knob—plenty of physical knobs are irritating and only good for either small or large changes, or feel unpredictable, or don't have good tactile feedback (too smooth and too chunky are both bad).
Having to LOOK at the number? ;)
I can talk to the phone while I'm slicing: 'Hey Siri, set a timer for x {timeunit}"
> "Wired audio."
Hoping this one doesn't keep disappearing...
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