I'm usually a defender of the single screen on the Model 3/Y, but on this, the author is right: the new UI (v11) is terrible compared to the previous one (v10).
Not only does it hide commonly-used safety-relevant functions behind extra taps in sub-menus (as detailed), it was apparently done to free up space to offer a 'dock' of app buttons - three permanant and three 'recently used'. I struggled to choose three apps I needed enough to fill the permanant spaces - and certainly don't need quick access (when I'm driving!) to Netflix, or games, or whatever is popping up in 'recently used' today. I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available, but alas that's been hidden too.
It's a total cluster-f*ck that makes no logical sense when considering the need of drivers, and I hope they listen and revert at least this aspect of the UI.
What I really dislike about the "you don't own this, the cloud does" is apps changing without me having a say in it. Spotify is great, but if they decide they want a videoclip-playing-background then my phone at some random moment starts doing that. I feel like it takes some time / attention from me each time something like that happens because now I need to figure out how to turn it off or live with it. And I can't control when it happens, so I'm probably doing something else. This wasn't a thing let's say 15 years ago with the original iPod.
Now imagine this happening to your car. I would sell the car as soon as possible. Cars, like ipods, are tools that should not require extra attention at random moments.
To add heaps of salt to the injury - automotive functions like seat heaters, defroster, wipers, energy usage, etc. - those cannot be pinned to the quick access bar. Only apps like Spotify, Netflix, browser,...
It's a CAR, ffs! Tesla, please stop acting like it's a cell phone
Interesting how a software update can make a car less safe without any option for the owner to go back.
Sadly we see such things more and more. For example a 3 year old TV looses apps such as Netflix or Skype which where specifically advertised on the box.
And I'm usually a defender of most interface updates, I know most people resist change especially when it impacts their muscle memory. But I think that change is good for the brain.
That being said, the new interface is terrible. So many things now take 3 taps as opposed to one.
I wonder if Tesla made the mistake of using A/B testing instead of vision-driven design like Apple. (Side note, just finished reading "Creative Selection" by Ken Kocienda of Apple, an interesting read on Apple's approach to design and why it is so successful as opposed to Google's).
I was listening to Joe Rogan the other day, trying to see what the fuss was about, but I ended up listening to Carrot Top for 3 hours[0]. They where talking for a minute about wealth, and how once you go over the threshold of never having to worry about money, it doesn't keep getting better. You don't feel much difference between 10M and 100M, apparently. Rogan gave the example of his baller house. He said that no matter how amazing your house is, you might have a mansion with two pools and dining for 200 guests, and a games room designed by Vanilla Ice. But once the glow of the newness fades away, then it is just your house. It is just the same place you go to every night. All stuff has this property.
Tesla are trying to recreate that new car smell and feeling by refreshing the digital dash board and software features. And deploying an old Microsoft trick of rearanging buttons to produce a new experience out of nothing. Instead of fighting the falling attention spans, Tesla hopes to remove the need for them altogether. So you can continue tapping and scrolling while driving.
Take my upvote. Came here to say exactly this. If the author is getting attacked on Twitter I wonder how many of the attackers are Tesla shareholders (or bots for shareholders) vs actual owners. The new UI is a step back and hides often used functions that used to be “one click” off the Home Screen. Changing driver profiles is a great example.
I too think the single screen is great for simplicity and making the cost of features I don't care about (many) low because they can just be buried in a sub-menu.
Tesla UI has always seemed pretty terrible to me though. Their use of space, and insistence that you need to see a photo realistic picture of the car you are driving that takes up a massive amount of real estate is crazy to me.
On the other hand, I find a lot of car companies struggle with UI once screens come into play.
Even apart from hiding important icons, simply redesigning a UI for a car sounds like a questionable idea to me. You think you know your car and where everything is, and suddenly, while driving, you discover that everything is in a different location. Even just that can he a bad idea in situations where your eyes should be on the road.
> I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available
This annoys me because our Model 3 can never decide who is getting in for a drive. Without fail it trys to adjust the seat to accommodate my 5 foot partner when my 6 foot frame is in the seat.
The removal of the profile icon makes undoing this even more of a chore.
"Data-driven UI design" can easily be myopic and sometimes disastrous. If you blindly follow the frequency of UI actions, you may hide seldom-used actions that are critical for safety in rare moments; or you may overly optimize for pro users and leave first-time users out in the cold.
> I'm usually a defender of the single screen on the Model 3/Y
Slightly off-topic, but out of curiosity: what is your typical defense here? I've seen a lot of people complain about it (and their arguments make sense to me), but I haven't seen anyone defending it. Yet.
>I'm usually a defender of the single screen on the Model 3/Y,
Nothing on earth would convince me there is any necessity whatsoever to having a screen in your car, much less a touchscreen. But then again I'm also against power steering, ABS, and generally any and all electronics that obstruct feeling from the steering column. Don't even get me started on automatics. Cars for me ended in the 80's, everything after that has been gravy. I see Tesla as nothing but gravy.
I'd be curious to hear why/how you defend it? I cannot think of a single benefit.
> "The problem isn’t really that complicated: originally the defroster icon was visible on the bottom. With the latest December 2021 update it is now hidden behind the temperature indicator. Tapping the temperature brings up a sub-window with the defroster icon."
Even after reading that, I had to look at the pictures again, and read the paragraph again to find where you are supposed to tap. When they simplified the UI, they also removed the degrees symbol and the fan.
Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
The manufacturer changing the UI of a car after you bought it should be illegal or at least highly restricted.
I think many of us have been incensed by UI changes in software we use for our daily work, and that's already bad enough; but IMHO this really crosses a line.
There were jokes when Apple changed the scroll direction, comparing it to the steering wheel of a car suddenly working opposite to what everyone is used to; I'm not sure if it's possible to do that with a Tesla or other modern car, but it's disturbing that we seem to be headed down that path. What an absurd reality.
The icons-only UI is also a huge regression; would it really take much extra effort to add a text label? I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up, but much of the world knows English, this is an American car sold in English-speaking regions, and changing the text in software is much easier than a separate part with different printing.
(I drive a 50-year-old land yacht that's received many upgrades, but all under my control; so my perspective may be slightly biased...)
Tesla drivers have called this a feature not a bug for years and bragged that their vehicles can update over the air like a smartphone… while the physical knobs on my Subaru will only ever do what they were designed to do when I bought it.
Well, just like a smartphone, sometimes the latest OS update makes changes that people don’t like. For good or ill, I think the Tesla way is probably the future for most cars and my not-so-smart vehicle UX will be increasingly rare.
I truly believe that UI in software must be done by an external consultant, on a one-time contract basis. Don't hire them full-time, they will fuck it up eventually. It is extremely limiting for a designer to work on the same app, same design every day. They will always try to bring in a new UI every couple years, just to maintain their own sanity. But it's not good for the product and its users. So let designers work on various different products.
>I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up,
How so? If they design something that doesn't fit the screen, etc. in another language - it's just a bad design. Localizations have been a standard process for decades already. They can be quite challenging when it comes to bidi, yet most left to right languages are no issue to even bring the topic.
I would say that most of the customers that buy Tesla more or less expect the UI to change with time. That's why they bought the car in the first place.
- I know I do, love the fact that the car still feels alive and evolving after I bought it.
Then I think the new ui is worse than the older one - but my wife prefers the new one.
> The manufacturer changing the UI of a car after you bought it should be illegal or at least highly restricted.
Mandatory user feature flags would be a good solution for that. After installation if you don't opt-in for the new features you get the same behavior as before.
I hope they filed an NHTSA complaint, as they’re describing a software update that will increase the risk of collisions, injuries, and/or deaths if left uncorrected.
US Tesla owners, if your Tesla is affected by this issue, and you believe that removing the one-tap defroster button is a safety risk to your driving, please report that ASAP: https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem
That's similar to my own thought. An update that affects controls for safety-relevant features - and defrost certainly qualifies - should require prior approval just like a physical update to each year's model would. This update should never have reached cars on the road.
Scott Jenson is great. It’s sad that he got so trolled.
I hope the folks at Tesla paid attention. He’s one of the top UX people in the world.
His book, The Simplicity Shift[0], was one of the seminal UX books in my career. I still use many of the insights that I gleaned from it.
It’s a real short read (and a free download, now). It was written when everyone was still using flip phones, and was very useful in doing a brutal UX triage.
Thank you for the link to the book. It reminds me of a product I worked on. The first version was command-driven, because that's what us programmers were used to. When our own sales people proved unable to do a demo without messing it up, we knew it was time to go back to the drawing board. We tucked the keyboard away in a drawer where you would pull it out only when needed, and replaced it with 6 buttons. Those buttons let you pick from a preconfigured menu, which walked you through the process step by step once you selected something.
I work on UX/UI for startups. Have both worked for big tech companies and have many designer friends in big Tech co’s. The pattern I unfortunately see is that many of the larger firms somehow think they need dozens (a few cases: hundreds) of product designers who are all fiddling in the exact same interface. It’s absolutely nuts.
It becomes an internal battle of who finds a more clever way to present a design in a meeting to a product manager. I’m sure all of OP’s complaints sounded like very clever solutions in meetings. But that’s not where your users are.
Please. Keep your design team to a minimum. Design is not like engineering. More designers working on a single piece of software is counter productive.
Another way to think of this is: no one gets promoted for keeping things the same or making small optimizations. PM’s/designers get rewarded for sweeping changes, which is why UI for a given product often gets worse instead of better. The first version was the usable bare-bones MVP, then things bloat as ppl stuff in features, then it all gets swept away in a “refresh” which often buries the most useful stuff that was simple and boring for the PMs — but they forget about new users seeing it all for the first time.
It would be awesome if tesla let us truly customize the UI with some CSS, or at least accept a few themes that they bless. I want to have my energy usage always visible somewhere on screen, for example, without completely blocking the map…
I drive often rental cars. A lot of modern cars have a difficult UI. Often are things somewhere hidden, while even on the oldest car, there was just a button.
I've seen initial versions of UIs having been created in a certain way because of multiple valid reasons (people that worked on it really put some thoughts into it), those reasons (priorities of fields, differentiation of informations, speed of entering data, overview of the data, ...) were never written anywhere => the next people that worked on it changed that because of any reason and the result was often worse - maybe by having guidelines/explanations associated to the UI (similar to what is done for the app's code) would avoid that.
I think you’re hitting on a real problem, but one that’s slightly adjacent to what you describe. The size of the design team is correlated with, but not the cause of dysfunctional product and design management. A large team where responsibilities and ownership have clear delineation, and ideas are validated through research, shouldn’t result in cleverness competitions.
Thing is, it‘s not just Tesla. Old economy carmakers are taking a page from the playbook by now to skip to the front line — and it‘s exactly the wrong one.
Having driven the VW ID3 a few times, it‘s truly horrible in this regard.
The climate settings (yes, including fast defrost!) are „not available“ until the systems have booted up which takes forever.
Auto-Hold as a critical driving feature which had a hardware button before took me (as an engineer) a whopping 10 minutes to find in the third page of a random submenu.
The voice control is located as a touch-not-press button at the outer edge of a steering wheel so when (not if) you accidentally touch it in narrow turns, the confused useless voice blasts full volume at you while you‘re in the most complex driving situation.
It‘s as nobody had driven or user tested their cars before.
And here I am, an early technology adopter of two decades, feeling like an old man yelling I want my hardware buttons back.
I’m airlifted there isn’t more push back against all-touch interfaces in cars.
Honda put a volume knob back on its 2021+ Ridgeline. Might not have been consumer feedback, but people hated the touch volume control in pre-21 models.
I loathe having to navigate menus and screen to find basic functions. My Honda had touch radio, with access to some set-up options, but daily functions are physical buttons. I like it this way. I’ll likely never buy a Tesla.
I still remember the days when buttons were meant to look like buttons, and that was actually something we specifically aimed for and got [correctly] criticized on when we got it wrong.
Back when Skeuomorphism was in vogue, it was far easier to train users to use computing devices. These days you "just have to know."
And, no, it isn't just Tesla. All the major tech companies have given up on usability (e.g. remember when Microsoft had a usability research lab and improved the products using lessons learned?).
I think the touch display within Teslas is dangerous. Physical buttons and dials allow me to feel around and not take my eyes off the road whereas a touch display has no such method of feedback. Sure it can vibrate and sure there are voice commands but now instead of pressing a button I know exists physically at location X I need to have a conversation with my car to turn heating on and off or I need to remember exactly where my finger is in space, and adjust that for UI updates and how the UI changes in each submenu.
What if the sun is really, really bright today well now it's harder to see the contents of the display and we're back to conversation mode.
Close your eyes and navigate through the settings menu on your phone down a few menus to toggle a setting. I doubt you could do that first time beyond only opening the settings app itself. Why do we allow this to be implemented in cars where your attention on the road defines whether or not (in a non-trivial amount of cases) you or someone else lives or dies.
Doesn't obfuscating the location of the defroster control run afoul of the NTSB safety regulations since a window defroster has been required safety equipment in all cars since the early 70s?
Can some UX person please splain me why hiding things behind menus is such a trend? Even if there is a fixed window and a ton of whitespace (like this car), everyone wants to hide most frequent click targets behind a hamburger or dot or gear or wrench icon somewhere. Why?
Their application is also rather a downgrade. They promised fixes. Lets see. It's not super bad, but definitely a step back.
"Data proven decision" is just an excuse.
I didn't use defrost button for almost a year. Yesterday I had a snow storm and I wasn't able to find defrost function. It's appears you have to swipe up in climate settings of the app to see extra options. Why? Make it at least contextual. If I enable HI heat mode, suggest me these options if you think such option in hot countries is redundant, don't blame data.
Now just imagine an owner is not millennial on Gen Z, they will never find this option.
So with one simple update you turn them from proud tesla owners who heat up the car from snow from a warm sofa to a frustrated blocked by snow user. Even though the hardware is amazing.
v11 update was the straw that broke this Tesla owner's back. We just purchased a new EV from another manufacturer and are selling the Tesla.
I'm so glad there are an increasingly larger range of EVs to choose from. In Australia the choices are comparatively limited still, but more and more are becoming available. When we got our Tesla the choices were really Tesla or cars with really limited range.
I used to think I'd get used to the touch screen and muscle memory would allow me to do things while driving easily. Hasn't happened - I use the steering wheel buttons for changing the temperature, but everything else requires taking my eyes off the road for too long.
Test drove the new car and was surprised by how better physical buttons were. The cognitive load to drive it was so much less. After years of Tesla touch screen land, I think I'd forgotten how much easier and usable traditional interfaces are.
I would be downright excited to go out and by a Tesla if I was allowed to pay a bit extra and have physical buttons to control things.
I get that Tesla wants to save money, both in assembly costs and "lower cost = more potential buyers", but there has to be a large market of people who are willing to pay more for a more usable car.
Is even having all this stuff on a center console touch screen such a good idea? I drive an old Civic with no touch screens and I know every function by feel—hardly have to take my eyes off the road. Driving my wife's car or parents' car, both with touchscreens, I've occasionally found myself cruising down the interstate at 80 mph tapping through nested menus... I've never driven a Tesla, but I'm skeptical that a giant touchscreen has better UX than the usual array of knobs and buttons, all the more so if I have to use it for basic things like defrosting and the UI is revised on occasion.
Tangentially, the tie-breaker that got me to buy a 2020 Ford Escape Hybrid over the competition in that size-range (2020 Toyota RAV4, 2020 Honda CR-V) was on how much I liked its dash, and its smart choices of hard buttons vs touch-screen.
I particularly liked that the Escape had hard play/back/next (and a screen off!) buttons, and good use of screen-space. The CR-V wastes precious screen-space to always-present app shortcuts, as well as precious dashboard vertical space for just the volume/power button. The RAV4 has a bunch of function shortcut physical buttons around the screen which I think are also a waste of space: once you're in Android Auto/Apple Carplay, there's little reason to go back to the car's apps.
I think we're still in a pit of bad car dashboard design, after a precipitous fall into touchscreen madness. Tesla's the worst offender, but I'm pretty impressed by Ford's design.
≥If you have two buttons, there is a third ‘object’ created, the decision a user must make on which button to tap. This cognitive load is invisible and rarely discussed but it can be a real source of confusion.
I was just making this argument on a kde mailing list about the kburgermenu. It hides the main menu, that I've been using for 30 years, behind a burger. It adds a surprising amount of cognitive load, and you don't need to be a UX professional to feel it. To their credit, the digikam team have so far resisted hiding the menu by default, but the first day you accidentally press ctrl±m will be a bad one, when you notice that menu missing.
And it is becoming fashionable now to drop the main menu altogether. Why, to save 10 pixels? Darktable and rawtherapee both have a lot of awesome features, but no menu bar. So they each have there own ideas on how best to reimagine the UI, and then you have to search the internet to learn how to do the equivalent of File ≥ Save As.
It's cool to be sleek, stylish and unique. But not in dangerous machine interfaces. FFS. I even heard that Musk got rid of the yellow/black striped safety tape from his factories, because they didn't fit his aesthetic aspirations. And I honestly don't know if that is a myth or not. Given this latest evidence, it is believable.
What is interesting is the fact that so much research, and expensive lessons in engineering and design are now ignored so easily. I wonder if it stems from a deeper societal phenomenon of denigrating the past? The younger generations, caricatured in the media as angry Greta Thumbergs, seem to have declared their undying enmity towards an generation they blame for their apocalyptic fate. So they also reject, instinctively, symbols of those people, the visible signs of the past, and the lessons handed down.
This may be a meandering rant, but I do feel that there is a real problem in UX and UI that is hurting us all. And fixing that requires some questioning of the root causes. Why did we collectively forget good UI paradigms and accessibility best practices?
- this hasn’t caused serious accidents (edit: which I’ve heard about)
- for all of Tesla’s (and other automakers’) focus on automating driving, they haven’t picked the much lower hanging—incredibly valuable—fruit of automating more non-driving tasks drivers must/likely will perform
- availability of basic safety-related controls isn’t regulated in a way that would have blocked this UI change
- the touchscreen-ification of car controls hasn’t attracted the same level of revolt and vitriol as has flat design on those same screens (guess what looks and feels like a button?)
[+] [-] mft_|4 years ago|reply
Not only does it hide commonly-used safety-relevant functions behind extra taps in sub-menus (as detailed), it was apparently done to free up space to offer a 'dock' of app buttons - three permanant and three 'recently used'. I struggled to choose three apps I needed enough to fill the permanant spaces - and certainly don't need quick access (when I'm driving!) to Netflix, or games, or whatever is popping up in 'recently used' today. I would like the driver profile menu to be quickly available, but alas that's been hidden too.
It's a total cluster-f*ck that makes no logical sense when considering the need of drivers, and I hope they listen and revert at least this aspect of the UI.
[+] [-] t0mas88|4 years ago|reply
Now imagine this happening to your car. I would sell the car as soon as possible. Cars, like ipods, are tools that should not require extra attention at random moments.
[+] [-] pcurve|4 years ago|reply
It's a bit disturbing they're able to make such drastic level of changes without heads up.
Can you imagine, taking your Honda Accord in for an oil change, and you find out that dealer completely re-arranged your center console?
I wish more features tied to safety should be available via physical switches. Even Model 3 has a physical hazard light switch.
[+] [-] thow-58d4e8b|4 years ago|reply
It's a CAR, ffs! Tesla, please stop acting like it's a cell phone
[+] [-] sschueller|4 years ago|reply
Sadly we see such things more and more. For example a 3 year old TV looses apps such as Netflix or Skype which where specifically advertised on the box.
[+] [-] TheSocialAndrew|4 years ago|reply
That being said, the new interface is terrible. So many things now take 3 taps as opposed to one.
I wonder if Tesla made the mistake of using A/B testing instead of vision-driven design like Apple. (Side note, just finished reading "Creative Selection" by Ken Kocienda of Apple, an interesting read on Apple's approach to design and why it is so successful as opposed to Google's).
[+] [-] irthomasthomas|4 years ago|reply
Tesla are trying to recreate that new car smell and feeling by refreshing the digital dash board and software features. And deploying an old Microsoft trick of rearanging buttons to produce a new experience out of nothing. Instead of fighting the falling attention spans, Tesla hopes to remove the need for them altogether. So you can continue tapping and scrolling while driving.
[0] Warning: even Carrot Top may offend some viewers today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byhzsQ0AzYI
[+] [-] dstroot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pa7ch|4 years ago|reply
Tesla UI has always seemed pretty terrible to me though. Their use of space, and insistence that you need to see a photo realistic picture of the car you are driving that takes up a massive amount of real estate is crazy to me.
On the other hand, I find a lot of car companies struggle with UI once screens come into play.
[+] [-] mcv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptskippy|4 years ago|reply
This annoys me because our Model 3 can never decide who is getting in for a drive. Without fail it trys to adjust the seat to accommodate my 5 foot partner when my 6 foot frame is in the seat.
The removal of the profile icon makes undoing this even more of a chore.
[+] [-] shrimpx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] localhost|4 years ago|reply
Lots of hate on this TMC thread on v11 [1]
[1] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/v11-software-update-...
[+] [-] mocmoc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themihai|4 years ago|reply
Maybe Tesla's UI team thinks they design the UI for self driving car
/end rant
[+] [-] lucideer|4 years ago|reply
Slightly off-topic, but out of curiosity: what is your typical defense here? I've seen a lot of people complain about it (and their arguments make sense to me), but I haven't seen anyone defending it. Yet.
[+] [-] MarcelOlsz|4 years ago|reply
Nothing on earth would convince me there is any necessity whatsoever to having a screen in your car, much less a touchscreen. But then again I'm also against power steering, ABS, and generally any and all electronics that obstruct feeling from the steering column. Don't even get me started on automatics. Cars for me ended in the 80's, everything after that has been gravy. I see Tesla as nothing but gravy.
I'd be curious to hear why/how you defend it? I cannot think of a single benefit.
[+] [-] jumelles|4 years ago|reply
So it's a Tesla.
[+] [-] csours|4 years ago|reply
Even after reading that, I had to look at the pictures again, and read the paragraph again to find where you are supposed to tap. When they simplified the UI, they also removed the degrees symbol and the fan.
Seeing as how 60-70 are both reasonable temperatures in Fahrenheit and speeds in miles per hour, it is not at all clear at a glance what that number means.
(Disclosure, I work for GM)
[+] [-] userbinator|4 years ago|reply
I think many of us have been incensed by UI changes in software we use for our daily work, and that's already bad enough; but IMHO this really crosses a line.
There were jokes when Apple changed the scroll direction, comparing it to the steering wheel of a car suddenly working opposite to what everyone is used to; I'm not sure if it's possible to do that with a Tesla or other modern car, but it's disturbing that we seem to be headed down that path. What an absurd reality.
The icons-only UI is also a huge regression; would it really take much extra effort to add a text label? I know people often mention localisation when it's brought up, but much of the world knows English, this is an American car sold in English-speaking regions, and changing the text in software is much easier than a separate part with different printing.
(I drive a 50-year-old land yacht that's received many upgrades, but all under my control; so my perspective may be slightly biased...)
[+] [-] yumraj|4 years ago|reply
I cannot agree more. A lot of safety in driving comes from muscle memory and doing without needing to look so that focus is on the road.
No wonder Tesla fans are fan of self driving and afraid of human driving, the effing Teslas seem like a usability nightmare.
[+] [-] cainxinth|4 years ago|reply
Well, just like a smartphone, sometimes the latest OS update makes changes that people don’t like. For good or ill, I think the Tesla way is probably the future for most cars and my not-so-smart vehicle UX will be increasingly rare.
[+] [-] perryizgr8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xxs|4 years ago|reply
How so? If they design something that doesn't fit the screen, etc. in another language - it's just a bad design. Localizations have been a standard process for decades already. They can be quite challenging when it comes to bidi, yet most left to right languages are no issue to even bring the topic.
[+] [-] FredrikSE|4 years ago|reply
Then I think the new ui is worse than the older one - but my wife prefers the new one.
[+] [-] edanm|4 years ago|reply
Why? Just don't buy a Tesla or other cars that do this.
You don't have to outlaw everything you don't like, you can just choose not to patronize the people who do this. Vote with your wallet!
[+] [-] copirate|4 years ago|reply
Mandatory user feature flags would be a good solution for that. After installation if you don't opt-in for the new features you get the same behavior as before.
[+] [-] floatingatoll|4 years ago|reply
US Tesla owners, if your Tesla is affected by this issue, and you believe that removing the one-tap defroster button is a safety risk to your driving, please report that ASAP: https://www.nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem
[+] [-] notacoward|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
I hope the folks at Tesla paid attention. He’s one of the top UX people in the world.
His book, The Simplicity Shift[0], was one of the seminal UX books in my career. I still use many of the insights that I gleaned from it.
It’s a real short read (and a free download, now). It was written when everyone was still using flip phones, and was very useful in doing a brutal UX triage.
[0] https://jenson.org/The-Simplicity-Shift.pdf
[+] [-] mark-r|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krm01|4 years ago|reply
It becomes an internal battle of who finds a more clever way to present a design in a meeting to a product manager. I’m sure all of OP’s complaints sounded like very clever solutions in meetings. But that’s not where your users are.
Please. Keep your design team to a minimum. Design is not like engineering. More designers working on a single piece of software is counter productive.
[+] [-] savrajsingh|4 years ago|reply
It would be awesome if tesla let us truly customize the UI with some CSS, or at least accept a few themes that they bless. I want to have my energy usage always visible somewhere on screen, for example, without completely blocking the map…
[+] [-] _trampeltier|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepearl|4 years ago|reply
In many cases it should?
I've seen initial versions of UIs having been created in a certain way because of multiple valid reasons (people that worked on it really put some thoughts into it), those reasons (priorities of fields, differentiation of informations, speed of entering data, overview of the data, ...) were never written anywhere => the next people that worked on it changed that because of any reason and the result was often worse - maybe by having guidelines/explanations associated to the UI (similar to what is done for the app's code) would avoid that.
[+] [-] mortenjorck|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endymi0n|4 years ago|reply
Having driven the VW ID3 a few times, it‘s truly horrible in this regard.
The climate settings (yes, including fast defrost!) are „not available“ until the systems have booted up which takes forever.
Auto-Hold as a critical driving feature which had a hardware button before took me (as an engineer) a whopping 10 minutes to find in the third page of a random submenu.
The voice control is located as a touch-not-press button at the outer edge of a steering wheel so when (not if) you accidentally touch it in narrow turns, the confused useless voice blasts full volume at you while you‘re in the most complex driving situation.
It‘s as nobody had driven or user tested their cars before.
And here I am, an early technology adopter of two decades, feeling like an old man yelling I want my hardware buttons back.
[+] [-] mavu|4 years ago|reply
Touchscreens (or touch surfaces) should not be used for any kind of vehicle function. period.
If you need to take your eyes away from the road, it is a shit ui.
If you can't feel but have to look to see the result of your interaction, it is a shit design.
If you need to look at the center console and down, it is even worse.
There is only one reason to get rid of all the buttons and switches, and that is design. because "ape goes ohhhh!".
And that should not be a consideration that is prioritized over safety.
[+] [-] alistairSH|4 years ago|reply
Honda put a volume knob back on its 2021+ Ridgeline. Might not have been consumer feedback, but people hated the touch volume control in pre-21 models.
I loathe having to navigate menus and screen to find basic functions. My Honda had touch radio, with access to some set-up options, but daily functions are physical buttons. I like it this way. I’ll likely never buy a Tesla.
[+] [-] Someone1234|4 years ago|reply
Back when Skeuomorphism was in vogue, it was far easier to train users to use computing devices. These days you "just have to know."
And, no, it isn't just Tesla. All the major tech companies have given up on usability (e.g. remember when Microsoft had a usability research lab and improved the products using lessons learned?).
[+] [-] tsujp|4 years ago|reply
What if the sun is really, really bright today well now it's harder to see the contents of the display and we're back to conversation mode.
Close your eyes and navigate through the settings menu on your phone down a few menus to toggle a setting. I doubt you could do that first time beyond only opening the settings app itself. Why do we allow this to be implemented in cars where your attention on the road defines whether or not (in a non-trivial amount of cases) you or someone else lives or dies.
[+] [-] ok123456|4 years ago|reply
Relevant statute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/571.103
[+] [-] imglorp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxdo|4 years ago|reply
I didn't use defrost button for almost a year. Yesterday I had a snow storm and I wasn't able to find defrost function. It's appears you have to swipe up in climate settings of the app to see extra options. Why? Make it at least contextual. If I enable HI heat mode, suggest me these options if you think such option in hot countries is redundant, don't blame data.
Now just imagine an owner is not millennial on Gen Z, they will never find this option.
So with one simple update you turn them from proud tesla owners who heat up the car from snow from a warm sofa to a frustrated blocked by snow user. Even though the hardware is amazing.
[+] [-] shimms|4 years ago|reply
I'm so glad there are an increasingly larger range of EVs to choose from. In Australia the choices are comparatively limited still, but more and more are becoming available. When we got our Tesla the choices were really Tesla or cars with really limited range.
I used to think I'd get used to the touch screen and muscle memory would allow me to do things while driving easily. Hasn't happened - I use the steering wheel buttons for changing the temperature, but everything else requires taking my eyes off the road for too long.
Test drove the new car and was surprised by how better physical buttons were. The cognitive load to drive it was so much less. After years of Tesla touch screen land, I think I'd forgotten how much easier and usable traditional interfaces are.
[+] [-] mabbo|4 years ago|reply
I get that Tesla wants to save money, both in assembly costs and "lower cost = more potential buyers", but there has to be a large market of people who are willing to pay more for a more usable car.
[+] [-] HomeDeLaPot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AceJohnny2|4 years ago|reply
I particularly liked that the Escape had hard play/back/next (and a screen off!) buttons, and good use of screen-space. The CR-V wastes precious screen-space to always-present app shortcuts, as well as precious dashboard vertical space for just the volume/power button. The RAV4 has a bunch of function shortcut physical buttons around the screen which I think are also a waste of space: once you're in Android Auto/Apple Carplay, there's little reason to go back to the car's apps.
I think we're still in a pit of bad car dashboard design, after a precipitous fall into touchscreen madness. Tesla's the worst offender, but I'm pretty impressed by Ford's design.
(for comparison of RAV4 vs CR-V, see dash photos in this article: https://www.garberhonda.com/blog/2020-vehicles/2020-honda-cr... )
[+] [-] irthomasthomas|4 years ago|reply
And it is becoming fashionable now to drop the main menu altogether. Why, to save 10 pixels? Darktable and rawtherapee both have a lot of awesome features, but no menu bar. So they each have there own ideas on how best to reimagine the UI, and then you have to search the internet to learn how to do the equivalent of File ≥ Save As.
It's cool to be sleek, stylish and unique. But not in dangerous machine interfaces. FFS. I even heard that Musk got rid of the yellow/black striped safety tape from his factories, because they didn't fit his aesthetic aspirations. And I honestly don't know if that is a myth or not. Given this latest evidence, it is believable.
What is interesting is the fact that so much research, and expensive lessons in engineering and design are now ignored so easily. I wonder if it stems from a deeper societal phenomenon of denigrating the past? The younger generations, caricatured in the media as angry Greta Thumbergs, seem to have declared their undying enmity towards an generation they blame for their apocalyptic fate. So they also reject, instinctively, symbols of those people, the visible signs of the past, and the lessons handed down.
This may be a meandering rant, but I do feel that there is a real problem in UX and UI that is hurting us all. And fixing that requires some questioning of the root causes. Why did we collectively forget good UI paradigms and accessibility best practices?
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|4 years ago|reply
- this hasn’t caused serious accidents (edit: which I’ve heard about)
- for all of Tesla’s (and other automakers’) focus on automating driving, they haven’t picked the much lower hanging—incredibly valuable—fruit of automating more non-driving tasks drivers must/likely will perform
- availability of basic safety-related controls isn’t regulated in a way that would have blocked this UI change
- the touchscreen-ification of car controls hasn’t attracted the same level of revolt and vitriol as has flat design on those same screens (guess what looks and feels like a button?)