Seriously. Without a dedicated on/off/volume knob for the soundsystem, the driving experience is diminished drastically, no matter how nice the car.
And of course touch is way better than eyesight when you are supposed to be paying attention to the road. As someone else said, rough motor skills are safer and more appropriate in a car then controls needing fine motor skills.
I know this makes me a clueless annoying boring techie nerd :), but I still cannot properly fathom how this is a minority opinion.
NOBODY in my non-techie group of friends or family cares. Not.even.remotely.
I watch them struggle with their touch screens, I even listen to them rant, but when asked about it afterwards, it's fine. Just fine. Sexy. Sleek. Desirable. Why do I have to go and ruin everything?
Honestly, even HVAC - I watch my family with "Auto HVAC" constantly fiddle with it, as they scroll to some meaningless numbers - 18C, 21C, 24C, back to 20C, etc all in the same drive. Whereas my ancient Subaru knob stays in the same position through the drive, without needing to ever look at it. If it's on the right, hot air will blow; if it's on the left, cold air will blow. Whereas with Auto, you literally never know what you're going to get. It's not on conscious level - everybody thinks their Auto A/C it's awesome. Until you watch their actual sub-conscious behaviour on a drive.
It's because the layperson isn't constantly observing systems and thinking about how effective or efficient they are. Their minds just don't seem to work like that. (Perhaps there's some area of expertise they have which applies outside the realm of technology...)
While fumbling with some poorly designed UI, they don't appear to get as angry and exclaim, "This user interface sucks! My previous car had a button to turn the A/C on and off."
They just accept it. I could get philosophical (thanks for asking!), and I think that's a general problem with humanity. Too many are too accepting of just whatever comes along, and that's how we converge on terrible designs and terrible public policies and on and on.
> It's because the layperson isn't constantly observing systems and thinking about how effective or efficient they are. Their minds just don't seem to work like that.
Probably because constantly observing systems and thinking about how effective or efficient they are is way less effective and efficient than just using the system.
People have the same options you do and make different choices. I'm well aware I could have a smaller phone. My last smaller phone was really annoying for web browsing, which accounts for like 90% of my phone usage.
I’ve got a 12 mini. It’s just about usable, however I find myself using it less for things like the internet as anything in the top left is out of reach
If you want to spend any significant length of time long form reading, even a 5+ year old E ink e-reader would be better than the biggest and newest phone.
For me, there's literally no use of this much screen area on a limited communication device that I use away from home. Not a single upside. I'm not a large person, I often use my phone with one hand, and I almost never watch any sort of video on it. I trade the convenience of an ergonomically sensible phone size to get nothing in return.
In the modern society you'll be denying yourself a lot of convenience, and annoying other people in some cases, if you don't own a phone capable of running Android or iOS apps. So no, at this point it's a hard requirement that it runs a recent version of Android.
> Whereas with Auto, you literally never know what you're going to get. It's not on conscious level - everybody thinks their Auto A/C it's awesome. Until you watch their actual sub-conscious behaviour on a drive.
Honest question: do you really see people touch the level of their ac during a drive?
Auto is actual temperature control. The system tries to stay at the set temperature. It’s a lot more comfortable that having cold air blasted in your face like we used to. I have never witnessed anyone changing it while driving, only flow control.
No, the point is that the automatic temperature control controls the exhaust temperature. Once the target temperature is reached, you get a flow of not-very-hot air. Since it's moving, the wind-chill factor makes it feel like cool air.
>>Honest question: do you really see people touch the level of their ac during a drive?
Honest answer, not fudged for sake of making a point - Yes. Absolutely. I don't know if hyper-expensive luxury vehicles do better, but I can vouch that my wife has been frequently changing in our 2012 Kia Sportage, 2016 RAV4, and now 2019 Honda Odyssey. I've observed others do so frequently in Toyota Corolla, Honda Civiv, Subaru Crosstrek, VW Golf & Jetta. Like Kerning or Norman doors, or a low battery in screenshot, once you notice it you can't help notice it ever forth.
So those are my observed facts - people fiddle with their auto A/C a lot.
Why? I have my theories, but that is something I'm less confident about and none of them may be correct or sufficient (I've tried asking people, but as mentioned, most have no idea they're actually doing it and it doesn't seem to be on conscious level; which is reasonable - my own adjustment has always been "automatic" until I started paying conscious attention):
- Perhaps it's just psychological. If I'm feeling cold, I don't trust the system and I turn it up. If I'm feeling warm, I want it colder faster. If it's -10C outside, I'll turn it up to 24C even though it may not get me warmer than if I just left it at 21C. Then it gets 24C and I'm hot. This may be just a case of humans using good system badly.
- I think however, is that system ignores some of the reality. The AIR temperature may be a steady 21C. But if the air is 21C in cabin on a dark cold night when it's -10C outside when the very windshield seems to suck the warmth out of my body, I probably actually want it warmer. If it's 21C air but noon July sun is blazing on me, I probably actually want ambient temperature colder. If I start a July trip heading south and Sun is blasting on me, I need A/C cooler; then I turn North-West and sun is behind me, and all this A/C is now chilling me too much. I think it's an error to think ambient temperature is all that our body cares to be comfortable - I think what we're wearing, how we're feeling, what the radiative environment is, etc, are all factors.
- Finally, it's that unpredictability and chasing. Heavily influenced by above, sometimes you're just comfortable, but A/C changes what it's doing because what it measures and what your lived reality is don't match, so you end up chasing each other.
Maybe 2021 Mercedes S class etc don't have that problem; maybe people have changed it and you never noticed, or maybe they genuinely haven't because your systems are better or people are using it smarter or they just care less or whatever other reason; but I have personally seen very few people set Automatic HVAC to a specific temperature and never touch it again.
I very rarely meet an air conditioner that can keep the whole cabin cold enough for me. We all just point the things at our faces and enjoy the active cooled airflow, right? So I'm wondering what exactly these systems measure -- unless the thermometer is on my headrest I guess, it isn't measuring a variable that has anything to do with my experience.
It's not the control system, it's the psychology. People just aren't willing to let the car control the temperature automatically. It drives me nuts, but that's the reality. I've yet to find a car made after about 1990 that doesn't handle it better than people do. Fiddling with the setpoint and/or the output just makes the system never settle. If you just leave it alone it gets the job done. But I'd say it's about 10-20% of drivers that actually do that. The rest screw with it constantly.
I don't want the car to control the temperature automatically, because maintaining a set level is not a useful requirement. 20° C or any other number is not a rigid standard. It might feel cold or hot for any given moment in any given situation based on any amount of other environmental factors - outside temperature, clothing, sunlight, activity level while in the vehicle. Human perception is famously wildly variable and often more relative than absolute.
I want a car that has a dial for "hotter" or "colder" and that's it. I'll adjust it in response to my perceptions at any given moment. With a motion wired in to a couple seconds of muscle memory and not poking around layers of touch screen menus.
Some car manufacturers have figured out that some people don't want the fancy garbage. I bought a Nissan Kicks last year and it has every control as a simple manual knob or button; the touchscreen only controls audio features.
I think it might be partially cultural. From my experience here people don’t have A/C at home, wear adequate clothes for the weather and expect temperatures inside to be in a confortable range and that’s it. Everyone I know just set the auto A/C to 20 or 21 and forget it exists.
> Perhaps it's just psychological. If I'm feeling cold, I don't trust the system and I turn it up. If I'm feeling warm, I want it colder faster. If it's -10C outside, I'll turn it up to 24C even though it may not get me warmer than if I just left it at 21C. Then it gets 24C and I'm hot. This may be just a case of humans using good system badly.
If they use linear control that would actually help a bit.
What I would like is a range on the temperature. If it's between 17-21, don't bother wasting energy on getting it cooler or warmer.
They all use a PID in my experience. I think people are victims of a self fulfilling prophecy. They are actually making their temperature controller terrible by disturbing it and disturb it because they think it’s terrible.
Just to give you more anecdata, I have had both auto and manual AC and I fuss and fidget with both obsessively.
Part of it is that I often want a cool breeze regardless of the ambient temperature. I feel somehow more focused and relaxed with cool moving air, no idea why or how normal that is.
Air has more properties than temperature, that's the issue with auto AC.
I agree with this, I've seen it repeatedly. There has got to be a term for people who aren't aware of how they are suffering yet still say everything is fine. The only term I can come up with is "complicit in their own oppression." :)
It's akin to people with low emotional intelligence, who aren't aware of their behaviour or moods and who spend no time at all reflecting on themselves.
On that note, my wife either sets to the absolute minimum (60F) or max (80F) and alternates between the two extremes as she inevitably becomes too hot or too cold with one of those settings. I've tried my best to help her understand the insanity of it, but no luck yet. I think it's actually a throwback to the days when there was just red and blue to indicate gradually larger amounts of hot or cold.
The alternating all the way is a little insane but I can kind of understand because the old UI of heat or AC level knob is more intuitive . When I first get in a 40F car I don’t want to set it to 72 or whatever I just want max heat I can get as soon a possible while knowing my 72 is meaningless until the engine warms up. I don’t trust my car to use max heat until exactly 72 so I set it all the way to 80 then back off.
Doesn’t it work like your home thermostat for the 80s - heat is on until temperature sensor equals 73, then heat is off until temperature sensor less than 71
No,there is a flap that mixes outside air with hot air. The fan is always on, depending on how the flap is set you get more hot air mixed in with the outside. The heat side is always hot when the engine is warm, even on the hotest summer days.
Yes, but it's actually not that simple. If it blasts too hard there's the chance it will have to start cooling.
I suspect cars use linear control for heating and cooling, it's easy to implement and well understood. In that case it will not use max heat until it reaches the target and turning it to max could get you there faster.
It's actually really not a simple problem, look into control theory of you're interested.
I recently bought a new car. The old one had HVAC as you described. I don't use the new one any differently though. When it's really cold, I turn the heat all the way up until I'm comfortable. Then I turn it down and keep it there. This is exactly what I did in my old car too. In the new one I just don't use the "auto" feature, and haven't even tried because my established behavior still applies.
Then only difference is that in the old car I knew that when it was really cold and I reached a comfortable level, I turned the knob to about two notches left of center, in the red area. In every older car I ever had it was slightly different and I learned quickly where my preference was. That's just like the new car where, once my comfort level is reached, I set things back down to 74F and leave it there.
Do some cars not allow users to disable auto? Mine has a dedicated button to enabling/disabling it. Otherwise, I agree that red/blue seemed to be a little clearer, but it only took me a few days of cold weather to find the sweet spot, same as any car I've ever driven
HVAC aside, I agree on other issues. Touch screen audio controls are awful and much more distracting to adjust while driving. I have to be very care to pick my moment. I think if I was so inclined, I could set things up so that I could argue with Google Assistant to do some of this stuff.
That frustration is offset a bit by the fact that-- and this will amaze you-- a button will roll my windows up or down. Not some crank I have to turn. And another button on the "key" will unlock the door from like 30 feet away! But I have problems leaving my keys in the car because I no longer have to actually hold, turn, and remove a physical key to get out of my car.
Trade offs! Hopefully UX design will gently nudge use back to a better middle ground.
Absolutely. And I can set a knob without looking directly at it. I don’t have to punch a button 42 times or have an autoincrement function overshoot.
Once I’m near the correct temp, I just move the knob one click at a time.
For the seat heater, I reach down between the seats, feel for the switch, and push it. Never take my eyes off the road. I don’t want to be doing these things with touch screens, especially at night. Most of them are too bright anyway, they ruin night vision.
A button has opened car doors for 20 years, the keyless start nonsense offers no benefit. To turn the engine off with a key you have to press a button then find the key.
When I’m driving I use the buttons on the steering wheel to change volume, station etc, more complex stuff needs a touch screen (CarPlay and maps), that’s fine because of the buttons on the wheel.
My current car isn’t great - it has “lane assist” which turns itself back on every time you start, and is in a menu system to disable (albeit two physical buttons to press). rentals I’ve had recently just have a physical button near the gearstick which your turn off once and it stays off)
It’s a minefield buying a car and ensuring you get all the right features (a key, a spare wheel, physical buttons for controls)
» It’s a minefield buying a car and ensuring you get all the right features (a key, a spare wheel, physical buttons for controls)
Hi, have you found any small car (I am thinking Toyota Corolla/Camry Honda Civic/Accord sedans) that comes with a full size spare? I drive a 2007 Toyota Camry that I bought in 2019 for about USD 5k. I know Jeep Wrangler and bigger vehicles sometimes have a full size spare but I'm not particularly fond of driving.
People on YouTube joke and say Toyota Camry is the perfect car for people who don't like driving but I can't think of a better description that fits me.
Yep, but it hasn't been standard, and was a new feature for me in my new car. Believe it or not, so were the power windows.
>the keyless start nonsense offers no benefit.
The only thing it does for me is mean that it's now much easier to leave my keys in my car. I think this trend began when luxury cars started adding it as a high tech marketing point, and then it trickled down over time to most cars in cargo-cult fashion.
The problem you're describing (Auto AC) isn't that automatic ac doesn't work, but that it's working within a small, very confined space and those differences in temperature are felt immediately.
From a personal perspective, I'd rather set it and forget it. It's why when I rarely use the car AC, one button is all it takes and it adjusts to something between 70 and 73, which is about the same it would be at home. When it's cold, you know the heater will be turning on automatically and I don't have to worry about waiting for the car to warm up for heat to work - the auto AC knows when it's hot enough and blasts it full strength at the right time, instead of me having to fiddle with manual controls to get the right timing, for example. Ditto for hot weather - blasts cool air with the push of a button.
The beauty is that you can have both, and knobs and auto AC aren't mutually exclusive, although that's gonna be up to the manufacturer and their market research.
You don't find it annoying having to override the 'intelligent' system?
With manual control, I can immediately start or stop hot and cold air; with a climate system, I can merely propose some higher or lower temperature, and the system may or may not do what I want it to do. I temporarily drove a Buick that had such a system, and found myself constantly having to override what the 'intelligent' system thought I wanted.
I prefer manual control. If the vehicle is too cool, I can immediately halt the blower without having to change the desired temperature with the assumption that the 'intelligent' system will halt the blower for me.
I've come to the realization that many things are just better not being made 'intelligent', especially when it comes to cars.
I actually wonder about the efficiency of these automatic systems.
These automatic systems are trying to, what, make the whole cabin achieve some set temperature? Who cares about the average cabin temperature? The airconditioner is pointed right at me. I care about the temperature of the air coming out of the vents and flowing over me. Assuming the back seat isn't populated, there's a whole volume of air back there being unnecessarily cooled..
I don't find it annoying particularly, but that's probably because a single tactile button push in my old 2004 Chrysler changes the HVAC settings from auto to manual. Still prefer the set it and forget it thermostat, however. Having both options is best, which is precisely what the article was about, and we're not in disagreement here, to be clear. Was merely discussing the merits of climate controlled hvac.
You’re describing a good auto A/C. The bad kind controls the average air temperature but has no concept of radiation, resulting in the driver being way too hot when it’s a cold sunny day and the sun is coming from the front left. The thermostat thinks the average temperature is fine, runs the A/C blower on low, and fails t cool the driver.
Considering I'm describing personal experience in a rather old American automobile that I still own and drive daily, it's probable that I'm describing the bad kind.
HVAC's job is not to deal with radiation and sunray angles, nor to adjust for it, IMO. To that end, it's superb engineering.
I had a 1991 car that I consider "good". I'm not sure exactly what its secret was, possibly just generally high fan speed, but it worked fine. In my book, a good HVAC's job is that, if I set the thermostat to a temperature I find comfortable, it should make me comfortable without much further fiddling.
My Tesla fails on this front. To fine tune it (which is quite necessary), I need to go through a layer of menus on the laggy touch screen and figure out which control I need to mess with to stay comfortable. This is dangerous.
I honestly thought, in the early days of the Smart Phone era, that some clever person would come up a way to have tactile buttons appear on the screen (& change with the changing UI). Whether it be a solution where the surface physically deformed or whether it be some sensory feedback due to electrical on our fingertips.
Remember when you could answer your phone as you picked it up? Remember T9 input where you didn't need to look at the screen to type? Imagine a tactile solution on your onscreen keyboard but still being able to swipe...
Imagine feeling where the 'answer' button was while you were picking it up and just clicking on it...
:sigh:
(Ironically, I was looking at the Nokia Classic series phones just last night)
Auto HVAC works perfectly well in most homes, and nobody wants to control temperature by directly turning on and off a furnace. That being said, auto control is not such a great convenience that many people upgrade old-school radiators to have thermostats.
But unlike a home, when a car is constantly changing direction, and speed, and sun is in your face or out of your face at times, perhaps you have heated seats that you've turned on, control based on a single temperature will always have difficulty making you feel comfortable. Better to control things directly.
I've had such a different experience in my vehicles. Even my 2000 Honda Accord had thermostatic controls that were usually excellent at keeping me comfortable. These days with remote start from an app and scheduling trips it can be 100F outside but by the time I'm getting in the car is a nice 73F inside.
I'm not constantly fiddling with my home's thermostat, why would I be doing the same with my car's? I'm sorry all your cars have had such terrible AC systems.
>>I'm not constantly fiddling with my home's thermostat, why would I be doing the same with my car's?
I assume because at home I'm generally in constant shade and not as exposed to radiative elements. Whereas in the car, air temperature is only one factor. Outside sun, temperature of surfaces etc are additional significant factors
I've had good automatic AC in a car, where it gets what I want most of the time.
Most of the rentals I've driven get it too, but they work differently than what you have at home, insomuch as they control fan speed and temp, they should haves unload temp sensor too.
Incidentally, I adjust my manual AC about as often as I do my automatic one.
There are no visible left/right click buttons on modern laptop touchpads. You get a sleek looking touchpad. Tap bottom left side harder to left click, right side to right click. There are still buttons beneath, but no, to designers eye they are somehow uglier than a flat broad spread out touchpad.
It reminds of the Norman Doors ("Design of Everything"). Designers made the doors in a mall so sleek and plain and 'beautiful', there were no handles or boundaries between doors. And people would get stuck trying to push the wrong side. So much for 'beautiful' design.
I think there's limits to these kinds of effects if it's actually a thing you interact with on what I'll call (for lack of a better term coming to mind) a blue collar basis.
My reasoning (story time):
I got hired to fix up a piece of custom-built software that was essentially the core business function for a series of medical clinics. They'd spent quite a bit of money to replace an older DOS system with a fancy new .net app. It was flashy, sleek looking, but also slow, buggy, and hard to use for the staff who did 99% of the work within it. Part of my analysis involved looking at the software they were using before the new .net app they paid for, which was something they'd kept alive probably a decade past its best before date by running old versions of Windows or running it on Dosbox.
The staff loved the ancient thing and hated the new modern thing because the new modern thing made everything about their jobs harder, despite being much easier on the eyes and displaying a lot more information on-screen. The old DOS app was built to be used keyboard-only, so it was much faster than using a mouse for 99% of data entry things, which was the bulk of what people were doing with the app. By contrast, the development house that built the .net app to replace it didn't seem to even know what tabindex was for. Literally you couldn't tab around any screen in the app in any kind of sensible workflow way.
It took a while to fix it up but the thing that always stuck with me about that job was just how much one particular front office staff member thanked me profusely because she could now use the keyboard for everything again. There was a valuable lesson in it for me about the pitfalls of shiny vs functional.
the .net app to replace it didn't seem to even know what tabindex was for. Literally you couldn't tab around any screen in the app in any kind of sensible workflow way.
Software development is a smart job, but looking at some software makes you think who created it and what was in their mind. My pet peeve is frontend developers’ attitude to their enterprise users. “Okay, there is a table, so a user can click here on the add row button, then click at the select-item link, select an item (or click into the search input), click at the qty field and enter a number …”. Except that this user already enters thousands of rows per day and has no time for this clicking-around idiocy, they add rows by insert, they tab around fields, select-item is called automatically on empty cell focus, and they type right in the table of items to search it, which doesn’t work in web because tables cannot have focus. It has nice tr:hover effect though, cause why not. Useless animated bullshit with 0.1px typography and 2em margins.
And this mindset is everywhere, thinking that a mechanic who accounts for parts, or a doctor who fills in a condition details, or a store worker who runs between shelves, all have time for an hour-long chinese tea ceremony every time they turn to their computer.
Plus having separate left/right click buttons is much more reliable. My laptop's touchpad periodically expands when I leave it out in the heat, which sticks the left of the touchpad to the chassis so that I can only right click.
Not a car, but my main gigging keyboard for as long as I've been gigging has been the Korg SV-1, and a big part of the reason is that there's no screens, only knobs. It's a pretty great interface, all in all. 90% of the time I use the presets I made for myself the first week I got it, but whenever I need something else I have no trouble doing it within seconds.
It's fairly limited, in terms of features and sound bank, but it's amazing at what it does.
I’m very happy that even the new generation of affordable synths is mostly analog with single function knobs. Arturia MicroFreak/MiniFreak, Korg Monologue/Minilogue, lots of Behringer clones.
You can get productive with them in minutes rather than in days.
Previous generations required either lots of menu diving (everything in the 90s) or had the pesky multifunction knobs (Microkorg).
Yep, it's super important for musical instruments.
I recently bought a Hammond XK-5 organ. It has exactly the same control layout as the B3 which came out in 1955. Physical drawbars, dedicated on/off controls for percussion settings, a real knob to select which chorus/vibrato setting to use. The keys on the bottom octave are inverted black/white to select presents. It even has the separate switch for the leslie which gets tacked onto the front of the organ because Laurens Hammond didn't want leslie speakers used with his organs and wouldn't allow a built-in control so they had to do this as a hack. Totally unnecessary now, but still better than a button because you can swipe your hand quickly across it to change between fast/slow mode in a split second. It's just fantastic.
While you're playing, and want to adjust settings on the fly (a common thing in organ) you don't want to be going into menus to adjust things.
They made a few small affordances to cater for extra functionality like the fact that you can (optionally) program presets to include arbitrary settings; there's a menu system to customise, but you rarely need to touch it. The switches on the B3 (e.g. for percussion) are now buttons instead, since the on/off status is part of the preset and they use indicator lights for status. But this is a minor tradeoff and doesn't make a material difference IMHO.
Before I had the XK-5 I was using the B3 simulator in Logic and trying to adjust all the settings with the on-screen controls, and trying to play with a regular MIDI keyboard. It just wasn't pleasant at all, esp. trying to adjust drawbars with a mouse.
The Viscount Legend is another B3 clone that takes the same approach and from what I've seen looks just as good. Other clones have physical buttons too but don't follow the original layout and seem a bit more awkward.
I got the SV-1 specifically because of the limited interface.
Not a big fan of the organs, but the other stuff all has worked great for me. It's paid for itself several times over. My usual live keyboard setup is the SV-1 under an ASM hydrasynth.
I have a speaker bar and the touch volume controls drive me crazy to the point that I've decided I will never again buy a soundsystem without proper buttons or knobs for volume.
I think Honda got this exactly right, at least in my 2018 car. There is a touchscreen that controls everything, but also physical knobs and buttons for the important stuff you'd want to control while keep your eyes on the road (radio volume, A/C, radio frequency, seat heaters, transmission gear, etc). If you want more detail and more options, you can go to the touchscreen, but if you just need the basics, you can do it without looking down.
Recently rented a small-ish Ford (a Puma) which had physical control for almost everything you'd want to adjust while driving, though the touchscreen was pretty crap (and didn't duplicate most of the physical controls, which I didn't mind).
Also it had one of those infuriating pseudo-analog control wheels, where you can keep spinning and spinning the wheel with no effect once it reaches either end of its selection course (the ones where the selection wraps around is also bad, incidentally, probably worse really), thankfully it was for something of low importance (controlling the regime of the headlamps between off, DRL, standard, and automatic, which has an indicator on the dash).
My 2014 Mercedes has a clicky wheel/joystick combo with a menu system that doesn't wrap around, and it's excellent. I can always go to any item without looking because I know that 5up and 5left will go to the start of the menu (even if I don't remember which menu item I left it on, though it's almost always the music tab) and then I can navigate with the clicky wheel.
No other controls, but very easy to use without looking.
> My 2014 Mercedes has a clicky wheel/joystick combo with a menu system that doesn't wrap around, and it's excellent. I can always go to any item without looking because I know that 5up and 5left will go to the start of the menu (even if I don't remember which menu item I left it on, though it's almost always the music tab) and then I can navigate with the clicky wheel.
Sure for a menu system control it makes complete sense. But the control I was talking about is completely specialised with a discrete number of steps, in that case having a wheel with proper stops is much more convenient.
Also I misremembered, the headlamp mode was a wheel but one with proper stops, it was the selector for the ventilation throughput which didn't have stops and would just spin forever. And the modern peugeot I've driven have that for the drive mode selector (e.g. eco / normal / sport / whatever).
My wife and I got the last year of the Civic without a volume knob. I think it was a 2018? Adding to frustration was the temperature control knob right where you’d expect volume to be! Every passenger on a long trip eventually spun this at least once in an effort to control the sound. It was maddening!
We sold it back to the dealer less than a year later and got a new CR-V. I won’t say it was one of the most significant reasons but it certainly wasn’t _insignificant_.
The other issue with buttons is that typically buttons are flush-mount. That inevitably means you need to look at the button to press it. So it’s not just that you have awful feedback, even starting the process of engaging with the controls takes longer and requires eyes. Knobs and sliders can typically be found with muscle memory getting you first close enough to feel the “landscape” around the control, then use touch to find it exactly. Flush mount buttons almost completely prevent this.
I'd say anything in the car, really, but mostly the stuff in front of your eyes. My car has some chrome-like trim on the steering wheel, gear shift, etc. (It's a cheap car, so this is not just a case of it being luxury trim.) The sun occasionally hits them at the right angle to blast straight into my eyes. It's not frequent, but in the wrong circumstances it could cause an accident. Even once is unacceptable.
That's a trend in general aviation and it's maddening. It's all of the problems this thread has raised about touch screens in cars but with added turbulence as an extra hurdle and spatial disorientation a safety risk. You can't just pull over and deal with the finicky touch screen.
Responsiveness has many facets. tactile feedback (like the solid click of a rocker ), visual distinction , feedback latency (how many milliseconds between input and taking action), tactile distinction (can you distinguish the control without looking at it), audible distinction .
soft buttons , soft logic controllers and touch UIs fail at all of the above
the result is a sluggish, frustrating and counterintuitive experience when engaging with the world around you .
we replaced our kitchen range with a new budget model. they replaced the analog oven settings with a keypad .
the old model could be activated in 1/2 second blindfolded by turning the knob. you could see the setting from across the room eg when heading out the door.
the new range requires 3 button presses and holding the temp control button for 45 seconds while the temp slowly seeks 5 degree increments.
what sadist designs these systems? they can’t possibly be using them in their own homes.
Have you tried tapping the button instead of holding it? You can usually change the values a lot faster that way.
But I'm with you on it being stupid. I'm fine with the temperature control being digital (I've had issues with multiple non-digital ovens having too much inaccuracy in their temperature control), but there should be a knob to change the temperature.
> So what do product designers have against knobs? Several things. ...
Then the piece omits the two overwhelmingly important reasons: cost and reliability.
Knobs definitely are much better to use, but things with moving parts that stick out from the surface are not as reliable in population terms. Most people never have trouble, but that quintile that gives their stuff a hard time costs manufacturers a lot.
That seems like a claim without data support. Cost, sure. Reliability, I doubt there is a difference in reliability within product lifecycle. My anecdotal experience: every car I owned had a knob for music volume. It never broke. Other things broke, sometimes making car repair economically unviable. But the knob did not break.
> but things with moving parts that stick out from the surface are not as reliable in population terms.
I would be really delighted to know if auto manufacturers in particular really have data on this, and what they count as a failure.
I've seen a lot more electronics failures than I have mechanical failures in cars and appliances, and the trend seems to stick with displays and knobs. For example, the first thing to break on my car was a display, which I still haven't fixed because it would be hundreds of dollars. I have an old truck with some broken knobs, but the posts they sat on still work, so they're still usable. If I did need to fix them I suspect it'd be a lot cheaper.
Color me skeptical that increasingly fancy touchscreen displays are going to have any staying power. This has always kind of smelled like it was simply based on a logical axiom that "less moving parts is better and more reliable" rather than practical reality in the late 2010s-2020s.
Appliances used to be way more reliable too. I grew up in the 90s with appliances from the 70s and 80s that still worked when they were replaced a few years ago. The new oven has already shit the bed and needs a new board.
Everything is more complicated than it used to be, more likely to break as a result, and requires specialized parts to fix. And if the manufacturer doesn't sell that part anymore, your stuck buying a new appliance. What a racket.
Same. I bought a house recently, and the appliances are all from the early 90s except a couple from the late 50s. My parents asked when I'm going to replace them, and I reminded them that they've had to replace their oven twice in the past ten years because none of the new stuff works for any time period. Meanwhile my appliances are at their youngest old enough to be talking to their little appliance friends about their appliance 401k.
While I don't really disagree with you, don't underestimate survivorship bias, how many of that old stuff died early and needed parts, yes the parts were cheaper, but the repairs took usually took more labor.
Old toaster oven took one action to change the temp - turn the knob. New toaster oven takes multiple actions to change the baking temperature. It's ridiculous.
Yep. All the expensive electric cooktops have touch controls and were obviously designed by people who have never cooked anything in their lives, not even once. I got so fed up with mine that I had my gas cooktop re-installed, even though it was totally contrary to my personal GHG emissions goals.
I've been holding off replacing an old stove I hate for that reason. If someone wants my thousand dollars they will make a stove that is easy to control.
Yeah I have a relative who renovated their kitchen recently and got a fairly high end induction range with touch controls...it was quite expensive and has possibly the worst user experience of any appliance I've ever used.
As the touch areas get wet or oily they start to act weird, and they're right next to the cooking surfaces so they always get wet and oily if you're actually cooking anything. You have to lock the touch controls after using it because even a single drip of water can make it think you're doing some kind of invalid input and it'll start beeping loudly in the middle of dinner. Sometimes if you don't lock it it will start beeping endlessly in the middle of the night. After lots of back and forth it doesn't seem that this particular unit is defective, just the product itself is badly designed.
I love cooking on it when it works properly–the induction technology is amazing, but I will absolutely never buy one with out real knobs.
That sounds like the appliance at my new place. It's got a wall mounted microwave / oven unit with touchscreen controls at the top. such a terrible design. whenever the appliance is in use and you open at door the controls get steamed up and become useless.
at least I can turn it on over WiFi (I have no idea what the use case for that feature is).
Even though I have a "last gen" Subaru Outback I would never replace it with a new one because they put in a huge center console screen and removed the knobs for climate control. What is odd is the Subaru Ascent actually has knobs for all of this.
Originally they sold the Hilux in the US but they realized that basically nobody who was buying one in the US needed that much truck right around the same time it became obvious they were gonna need to drop some serious coin on safety and emissions hence they just developed a new vehicle that was a better fit.
I guess I don't have big-picture number. I have literally not had anybody replace a knob, ever. My car is 18yo and knobs are working fine.
Whereas, number of people in my immediate friends & family who had to replace $2500 touchscreens... I mean, I'm astonished that given temperature variations and sun and elements, touchscreens survive AT ALL.
> Then the piece omits the two overwhelmingly important reasons: cost and reliability.
Plus that not all industrial designers can create great designs. Often times when I look at e.g. my Bosch electric cooktop I can only imagine its awful touch panel was an afterthought in the design process. It's so bad, awkward and hard to use, it makes me feel sorry for those who created this thing. And for all its users just as well.
Cost savings? I mean, you don't replace the car's steering wheel with a pair of buttons - like on the hilarious picture in the article - just to save on production costs.
No, you don't replace the steering wheel because that's safety critical and the superiority of the UI is overwhelmingly important. You don't get to sell the product at all with a defect like that, so the "cost to the manufacturer" is pretty big.
The entertainment system, or a phone? Not safety critical, no need to provide real-time interaction. Cost dominates.
My car has a physical knob for the volume, which can also be pushed in to disable the entertainment system entirely. If I need to turn off the radio in order to give full concentration to driving, I don't need to navigate through menus in order to turn it off. I'd consider that safety critical.
There is a shitton of very crappy rotary encoders out there that attest to that.
For example, most microwaves I've seen that use knobs tend to wear them down pretty fast. Mine has a pretty much analog timer and just cannot be set for anything less than 1 min since it will randomly stop somewhere in the 0-60s interval due to wear.
A relative's oven has a digital relative rotary encoder, but again due to wear it tends to skip some positions from time to time. Meaning you'll rotate 180 degs and some days that will mean 30min, some days it will mean 10min, and then some other days it means 2 seconds.
It also uses the same knob to set the RTC, and with the knob in such state it is so much of a chore they have basically succumbed to the 12:00 phenomena.
I am a big fan of "knobs" (specially compared to capacitive buttons) but these days they are no longer reliable at all.
Automotive and aviation grade pots/encoders/switches are a different class of product and a good deal more expensive than the garbage they'll put on consumer electronics.
Sometimes that behaviour can be the result of a poorly written interrupt service routine that isnt reading the encoder pulses correctly. Ive found it to be a surprisingly common issue regardless of how new an item is.
A 100 year old knob is not a 50 or 25 year old knob. They're as different as the wheels on a horse carriage and the wheels on a Model T. They're not working from the same 100 year old design with the same expectations. Ford likely expected the crank handle knob to take some abuse.
I don't understand the point of this comparison: I sounds like you're assuming I don't realize a knob from 50 years ago is different form one today. Are you aware how dismissive that tone is? The point is we've had 100 years to make the better, and the claims from automakers that they break too easily doesn't hold water.
Digital vehicle temperature control is just infuriating. There are only two settings: blast the driver with freezing air until the rest of the car cools down, or roast the driver alive until the rest of the car warms up.
I've always dealt with that by just adjusting vents. If the A/C is freezing me, I point the vents a bit over me. If I'm very hot for some reason then I'll adjust one or more of the vents to point right at me.
> I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback. Will people get tired of having to look down every time they dial a number?
I love this question because of the easy answer: No! But that’s because it’s only a tiny part of using a smartphone and other things are more important.
The challenge for designers is generally to strike the right balance between immediate accessibility and findability of less common stuff. Adjusting the speaker volume is obviously a common action that should be possible quickly and blindly.
But if I want to change something uncommon I’d rather look through a well labeled menu hierarchy than wildly placed buttons and knobs.
Maybe someone can provide a bolt-on board that communicates to these new cars overwifi. The board would have tactile knobs for radio, wiper, AC controls, and maybe a cigarette adapter too. The mounting of it would be 4 screws that are screwed directly into the screen. Just vacuum any glass bits that fall to the floor after.
For me the biggest reason knobs are useful in a car can be observed by the surface-exposed HVAC dials of the early 2000s Impala (axis-aligned with X or Pitch axis):
If you're twisting a knob with two fingers and hit a bump, the anti-directional nature of the contact points on the knob cancels out the translation injected by a bump in the road.
The 2000's Impala showed that analog on the X axis and analog on the Z axis are very different, as it was virtually impossible to set the temperature accurately in an Impala if moving (still not the worst thing about that car, not even close).
This is why steering wheels are very effective input mechanisms. If you're jostling around, the wheel still doesn't rotate. Try driving one-handed on a bouncy road. I bet your hand goes to the top or bottom of the wheel intuitively.
I do appreciate when auto manufacturers who use touch screens put the screen near an edge or lip that I can use to stabilize by hand, but day to day controls should really have dedicated dials, knobs, and (at least) buttons.
The approach should be digital knobs, which work relative to their setting and roll-through endlessly magnetically. So software can react, but user is in control.
The worst change in recent years is kitchen plates all having these horrible touch systems or magnetic detachable knobs.
It's horribly slow in usage, monster learning curve, locking systems which all behave differently, fails when wet. It's so over-designed and over-engineered. It's so bad. Just provide a knob for **'s sake and when you turn it right, it turns on.
If I set the volume to 0 the software pauses a recording so I can no longer skip unwanted parts without messing with fast-forward while driving. These smart knobs invite designers to mess with basic functionality that has worked for decades (play, pause, rewind, fast forward)
Occasionally, due to a bug, on cold winter mornings when I set the heating to max, I won't get warm air even after I've driven for a while and the engine is already hot. I then have to move the knob to cold and hot again for the software to register and finally give me some warmth.
I'd like chickenhead knobs that are connected to the functionality as direct as possible, please!
Me too. If the content overspills you can't shut off the plaque because the control become unusable ('hot' or liquid on the surface displayed), which often leads to more overspills /autocatalyse.
I still think about my 2000 VW Jetta. It had the most satisfying buttons and knobs. I still think about the substantial feed and knock of the button. Click seems like the wrong word to describe it. Compare the Audi A4 of the same vintage which has tinny clicky buttons that I hate.
My new apartment oven has a touch screen. My wife was cleaning it one day and managed to put the oven into Sabbath Mode. Which I didn't even know was a thing. And it turns out does the opposite of what I thought it would do.
> And it turns out does the opposite of what I thought it would do.
As a Jew, this amuses me greatly. :) That day you learned about one of our greatest loopholes. BTW fun fact, it doesn't count as work if you get a non-Jew to do it for you (or in this case, a computer).
Physical knobs and buttons (preferably with universal indicators of current state) for mic mute/unmute, camera on/off, volume.
Laptops can have either built in or a usb/wireless accessory.
Mobiles also need physical buttons if not knobs.
Edit to add:
A raspberry pi zero or less and commodity buttons / dials in a well designed case should easily work for this. I know some streamdeck projects exist but not sure if they specifically aim for knobs and other tactile UX. Any projects in this space we can get behind or emulate?
My monitor ($750 few years ago) has only 3 levels of brightness effectively, because to change it you have to go through a hierarchical menu of around 10 clicks of different buttons, and then wait for a stupid bar to go to the desired value. I had to create 3 presets to at least switch day/evening/night modes with only 3-4 clicks.
TNG designers (Sternbach, Okida) waved it away by saying the touchscreens had tactile interfaces that reconfigured based on the interface/user. Best of both worlds.
I watched car reviews a lot to the point that it's probably not healthy for a person. Interestingly, most of professional car reviewers prefer physical knobs over digital or haptic. One of the modern cars that I really admire in term of innovations and utilities is the new Hyundai Santa Cruz. For better or worse, Hyundai is bringing back knobs for volume and climate control before it has even reach full year in US soil perhaps due to the many complaints they have received over the several months since it's launched [1].
But come on, the most intuitive control interface is not digital, haptic or analog, they all interfere badly while you're driving. The most intuitive with the least interference is your voices. Somehow all of the recent cars being reviewed has hit-and-miss for their voice recognition accuracy. If we as human race cannot even get the basic voice recognition right, how can we expect level 5 fully autonomous driving that being touted to arrive sooner rather than later?
When profit centered design enters the building, human centered design jumps out of the window. Rationalizing this with thousand UX cases and cluttered UI is not a solution to the user problems. But the users buy this stuff and so the things go on.
I too want knobs, but this line exemplifies why they're not coming back:
> I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback. Will people get tired of having to look down every time they dial a number?
Look at musical instruments, particularly synthesizers.
This world went from menu-diving and screens to a full-blown knobfest (for digitally-controlled equipment, mind you).
Specifically, no gear has ever not had the volume knob/slider; but now, there's a knob for everything else.
Also go figure, my $200 Sonicware digital synth made in 2021 can have 15 reliable, precise knobs that will last decades, as well as analog and digital I/O on the front panel, but my $20,000 car can't have either because of cost savings/reliability? Please.
And my Fostex 4-track recorder from 1995 has 24 knobs and 5 sliders, perfectly functioning, and if you think that musicians are gentle on their gear, you haven't seen many musicians.
Knobs and sliders on my Korg, Casio, and Yamaha digital synths from the mid-1980s work well too, never a problem with them.
Let's not pretend that lack of knobs is anything but a UX/aesthetics choice — and for cars, a particularly awful one.
Presumably your car will be in places with more demanding climate conditions than your knob-filled synth. And areas of high humidity or with lots of dust/gunk are the places that break down knobs the most.
But I agree that I think it's probably largely a UX/aesthetics choice. Low cost touch screens are usually pretty terrible at handling varying climate conditions, especially compared to some decent knobs/encoders. I'm hoping once the manufacturers are done broadcasting how "modern" their interfaces are, that they'll start adding knobs back in for the common operations (volume, climate control, etc)
I also wonder if the fear stemmed from back when knobs and buttons required extra wiring instead of using buses like most cars do now.
>Presumably your car will be in places with more demanding climate conditions than your knob-filled synth. And areas of high humidity or with lots of dust/gunk are the places that break down knobs the most.
Yeah, you wish. Have you ever been to a music studio, or a live show? You'd be lucky if nobody spills beer on your gear :)
Dust, gunk, smoke, humidity, and temperature are usually way worse than in the interior of a car.
Not to mention, I've never had an issue with knobs in any of my cars (particularly, the 2000 Honda Civic that I drove until 2017, or the 2010 Honda Fit that I'm driving now, or my partner's Toyota's from the same years).
Knobs breaking down is a hypothetical problem. The knobs are fine.
>I also wonder if the fear stemmed from back when knobs and buttons required extra wiring instead of using buses like most cars do now.
The fear comes from the need to sell "modern"-looking interfaces. If the new car looks like the old one, why buy it? Yet another good UX killed in the name of marketing.
Again, synthesizers went through the same cycle: knobs -> buttons and menus -> touch screens -> KNOBS. There was never a good reason to not have any knobs, especially on high-end gear. It was all about style.
> Yeah, you wish. Have you ever been to a music studio, or a live show? You'd be lucky if nobody spills beer on your gear :)
Haha touche. You're right, the amount of alcohol I've seen in my friends' synths when performing is uh not the way I treat my keyboards or synths that stay home lol.
> The fear comes from the need to sell "modern"-looking interfaces. If the new car looks like the old one, why buy it?
Agreed. I hope they snap out of their collective delusion sooner rather than later. In the meantime, I wonder if you can make your own knobby panel that interfaces with Android Auto to paper over the crappy UX of flat surfaces.
I hate the keyboard on my phone. For dialing a number, it's awful. Give me an old phone any day!
But the smartphone does so many other things, I put up with it.
That doesn't mean to say i wouldn't greatly welcome a smartphone with a dial on the edge, or a touchscreen with tactile feedback. But due to lack of imagination of designers, technical impossibility, or economic cost (i don't know which...) there's no such thing on the market.
I can accept the touchscreen for its broad utility, but poor UI is intolerable. Like how Android keeps covering up the dial pad button in the phone app with inane messages about duplicate contacts. When I want to dial a phone number, sometimes I need to do it “right now”, and I don’t care about duplicate contacts or whatever stupid thing it wants to nag me about. Put that shit in my notifications so I can deal with it in my own time, or just swipe it away.
Don’t get me started on text selection on iThings.
Yes, yes, and yes. The android phone app is a case study in ergonomics failure. It boggles the mind and clearly shows how smartphones are not phones anymore but pocket browsers.
I'm thinking of music keyboard workstations and stage keyboards. The products from Nord have swept the stage keyboard market because of their one-knob-per-function design, allowing for quick mid-song adjustments with no menu diving.
I was going to make the same point, more generally about electronic music gear.
People greatly favor knob-per-function and minimal menu diving. Having some kind of screen and minimal menus for rarely used features is fine, too, but anything that’s about playability and something you want to tweak in real time needs a knob or slider interface.
Yeah, not all of them but compare a DX7 to a Montage 7.
The DX has 2 sliders and 2 wheels, and a bunch of membrane buttons.
The Montage has 2 wheels and something like 10 sliders and knobs, ignoring the general-purpose knob and selector wheel next to the display, plus a ton of specialised physical buttons.
I don't see why not. Typing on Android has been an unceasing exercise in frustration ever since the real Swype and HTC keyboards went defunct. I made 5 typing errors while writing this message alone.
SwiftKey is good. It also has the nice feature in that it lets you raise the keyboard higher which is great for large devices so that you are not typing at the very bottom in an unbalanced manner.
Really? I can type exceptionally quickly and actually using the android swipe typing. At least as good as the original Swype. Sure it's not as fast as a physical keyboard, but I'm not writing a novel on this device. (3 typos made writing this)
I could T9 an SMS message while holding eye contact with a person. Right down to knowing certain words were “press buttons, down twice”.
I can almost blind type on a touch screen with both thumbs, too. However, it’s no where near as good as I was with hard buttons and Motorola’s particular dialect of T9. Towards the end, Motorola tried to get clever and start reordering the words based on MRU and it played havoc with my muscle memory.
99.5% of the time I only call my wife, my parents, my sisters, and my four best friends. That's 9 people. With my so much missed flip-phone I could do this, check it out:
Walk around the city with phone in pocket. Need to call one of them: pick phone from pocket (without looking), thumb-flick the screen open (without looking), thumb-press the person's speed dial number (without looking), done.
or
Walk around the city with phone in pocket. Phone vibrates. pick phone from pocket (without looking), glance at front screen for 1/3 sec to see who it was. If wanted to take the call, thumb-flick the screen open (without looking) while raising phone to ear (without looking), done. If not, toss phone back in pocket.
There was also the cost-of-phone factor. The thing was so cheap, I treated it like there was an old crumpled piece of paper in my pocket, never worried if it would get scratched or if the screen would crack. The constant worry when my smarphone falls on the floor sucks. I never had a better phone experience than with my flip-phone. Sadly, recently Whatsapp became so ubiquitous here, that people stopped calling and only texted, and eventually I had to upgrade.
I'm blind and I could call people whose numbers I know even on a dumb phone with no accessibility. At the moment, some strange failure of the phone screen reader, accidental switch off of volume or whatever and it is game over. Try to restart by the hardware keys and pray that you are not left with a thousand dollar brick in the middle of a trans-continental trip. Real story with my first touch phone with the only difference that at the time I didn't know the hardware keys to restart the brick.
I could do it while driving. It was much easier to do than you would imagine. The keypad only had 9 keys and if you would put the base of your thumb lightly on the 2 key you could reach the whole keypad without issue. Just about everyone learned to do this without trying. People who had predictive text like T9 had to work at it a little, but it was like riding a bicycle.
Sorry I meant the tip of the thumb on the 2 key. Telephone keypads are inverted. Also the sometimes keys would have a raised bump in the middle key like the 5 key so you type blind.
Texting while driving was safe! Kind of. You could sense what key you were touching and how many times you touched it. "ha" would be "442" - two presses to get to H, one press for A. "lol" was 555666555. Still safer than Swype and looking down to see the several autocorrect options it gives you, or wondering if your grip was proper for your usual thumb motion. Even if you don't like the reference to driving, this was still convenient. Go watch "The Departed" from 2006 and see how Leo's character types in his pocket.
It's the same justification for keeping radio and climate controls, as well as needed safety buttons like hazard lights, as physically actuated. It is much easier and safer than having to look at an ever-changing panel.
Imagine if your climate control knobs moved around your center console by several inches every time you used them. Was that fan control, or temperature?
Yes, touch typing is a thing, for many people who aren't "[b]usy Wall Street types".
I can still dial on an analog button phone faster than I can look up and dial a person on my iPhone, and I haven't done the former in 20-some years. Muscle memory is quite powerful.
Typing SMSes in school and college was easy with a classic keypad, and the error rates were very low... now even with watching the screen I make more mistakes than then.
On my BlackBerry, I could set the keys to dial individual phone numbers with a single long press. The FJ bumps made it easy to do without looking. I sure miss that.
I could text and drive without ever taking my eyes off the road. Probably still not the safest, but I constantly see people staring down into their lap while driving now.
My friend in college broke his phone's screen. But he kept using it for about a year without problems. He had every phone number memorised and could type messages without needing to look at the keyboard or the screen. You would be talking to him face to face and he could be typing out a message with his phone in his hand, inside his pocket.
Also not a car - but I recently got a gas fireplace insert that came with a remote control with a touch screen. It takes a few seconds for the remote to “boot up” every time I try to use it. Long enough for me to get frustrated and look away. But if I don’t stay focused the screen will turn off and I’ll have to start over. It’s frustrating enough that I’ve started research “dumb” remotes with real buttons
Okay, now that is the kind of interior design I want in a car. I don't want an off-roader though, so I hope someone comes along and makes a sedan or a hatchback with similar interior design.
Too bad it looks like a fridge and has a motor that consumes and pollutes a lot. Will make a great car for serious off-roaders and full time mommies picking up children from school no doubt.
One day, we’ll have reliable fast electric chargers and a backup for charging when off grid. I’ll bet that off road drivers would love to adopt electric motors if they could. The torque characteristics are great, regenerative braking is handy, and the lack of clutches is great. We’re not there yet, but Jeep is getting closer.
I am all for the knobs, especially for driving, but going retro now would probably add silly costs to manufacturing, so that ship has sailed. I don't use voice controls in the house (Alexa et al) because creepy listeners. But in a car, I'd prefer decent voice controls for sound and heating etc over touchscreen menus.
Ideal cockpit panel is one with a bunch of knob and a bunch of switch with e-ink label that allow you to freely reassign, and maybe a resitive instead of capacitive touch screen for some odds thing. They are less prone to accidently touching and work with gloves
Reassigning functions during use or over the course of ownership is a Very Bad Idea.
Even for professional commercial pilots there are numerous aircraft accidents which can be attributed to "alternate law" (different control-system response modes) engaging or disengaging at different times, often without clearly notifying flight crew of this fact. And this is an issue for operators trained and licensed to specific aircraft, instrumentation, and variants. Air France 447 is a classic example of this.
The case for automobile operators, many of whom receive cursory training at best early in their driving careers and carry this forward for decades, often operating novel or unfamiliar vehicles (rentals, borrowed from a friend, acting as a relief driver during a long trip) is simply a recipe for disaster.
Control functions should not change after designation, with the possible exception of auxiliary controls not critical to overall vehicle performance or function, or those which are accessed and used only when the vehicle is not in motion (e.g., diagnostics or repair information / interfaces).
The only thing I liked about my c2003 Toshiba laptop was the physical controls; a volume dial and a wifi switch. I also did like the Blackberry dial, scrolling through messages on my mobile isn't as convenient one handed as it was with the dial.
It's a cycle. Car designers went a bit crazy with buttons about 10 years ago. This was when bluetooth/carkits was becoming the norm and touchscreens were nowhere near good (cheap) enough. Or expected. So slightly older dashboards will feature upwards of 40 buttons while super modern ones will have none. In a few years they will go back to normal. As for smartphones, they are unfixable. Maybe tactile touchscreens will help in the iPhone 16 (or possibly even the iPhone 15S?)
I disagree overall (you're definitely right about it being an abomination in cars though). Touchscreens are bad when they move (spaceship launch, air turbulance, waves, uneven road). There's also a direct relationship with how bad touchscreens are, with how often you need to 'keep your eyes on the road'. Space, you don't really have to look out the window, planes you don't really need to look if you're IFR in IMC, boats rarely have traffic on the open water and don't have to stay in a narrow lane, cars have lots of traffic and narrow lanes. So I wouldn't say "perfect" or "good", but perhaps you meant various degrees of "forgiving"?
For spaceships, I think it's a given that launch should be automated; too many things happening rapidly to be handled by human beings. In space, though, actions are more forgiving to a certain degree, timing are usually more relaxed.
Yes. Mazda has their head on straight re: UX and smart design. Very very enjoyable cars to drive, as well. Their motto is "zoom-zoom", which they embody well.
I'll offer a contrary perspective that I haven't yet read here: Digital controls have the potential to be more accessible to people who can't turn a knob due to a mobility impairment.
The problem with that is digital controls are often made much smaller than its physical equivalent.
Things like pill bottles have large diameter caps for people with dexterity problems. That same person may not be able to press a small flat "button" due to hand-eye co-ordination problems. Or they may not even be able to feel the surface with their fingertips.
For myself I hate having to go tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap on a digital button when a quick twist of a knob does the same. At least have a slider digital control rather than discrete taps. Imagine instead of a doorknob to open a door you had to tap an electronic button 12 times.
Things like pill bottles have large diameter caps for people with dexterity problems
On a related note, if you have problems opening prescription bottles, let your pharmacist know. If the cap is put on upside down, it's much easier to open. It's no longer child-resistant, but there's a wide gripping area, and the cap top is threaded to screw into the inside of the bottle.
A lot of people don't know this.
Also, if you take a liquid medicine, every pharmacy I've visited can add flavoring to it for free, right there in the store. Things like grape or lime or bubblegum. It's supposed to help children take their medicine, but there's no reason life has to be artificially hard for adults.
My 2019 Ford Ranger has all three, opting for at least throwback one -
On the dash, a volume knob w/on-off button in the center and tuning knob
On the steering wheel, digital control buttons (L/R=tuning Up/Dn=volume)
On the Screen, touch controls
But that is all - the climate controls are all the damn flat, blend-it-all-in mini buttons or the touchscreen, so if the windscreen suddenly fogs up it's a few hazardous seconds while you have to keep looking back&forth at the controls and through fogged windscreen to find the [defrost] button.
And yes, I use the knobs probably over half the time. The steering wheel controls are also nice because they can also be used by touch without looking. Probably used the touchscreen controls a couple times while stopped, mostly as a novelty.
Gawd I wish designers would prioritize actual use over how good they think it'll look in some glossy brochure. and, frankly, at this point, I'd rather toss them all and have an ugly knob in a good spot I can use by feel (HINT: I'm NOT looking at it!!), than any flattened wall of pretty backlit buttons. I'm not lounging in a living room, idly caressing your damn panel, I'm driving a two-ton machine at speed.
And of course touch is way better than eyesight when you are supposed to be paying attention to the road. As someone else said, rough motor skills are safer and more appropriate in a car then controls needing fine motor skills.