Lack of tactile feedback for the sight-impaired is the obvious part but there is another thing:
Touchscreens just stop registering your touch when you get old. The older you get the less moisture there's in your skin, which at some point makes touch screens ignore you.
The worst of both worlds is Touch Buttons. No screen, just a touch-sensitive surface that's divided into areas that activate upon any kind of skin contact, whether intentional or not.
I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
The worst variation I’ve ever seen, courtesy of r/CrappyDesign: My oven uses a touchscreen, so whenever I open it, steam gets on the touchscreen and messes with the settings.
Don't forget to pair the Touch Button with a Minimalist design that gives no indication if a button has been pressed!
Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.
I spent (5y ago) so much time searching for induction stove with physical knobs. The touch interface at my previous place was driving me crazy, a slight misalidgment and the stove would beep like it’s end of the world. Luckily Miele produces some at the premium price (or was at the time) but I considered it an investment in my mental health.
A tiny amount of water getting on these buttons can make them go nuts too… I absolutely hate the electric stove ranges with surface touch buttons… as if those never get water on them…
The security keypads at work use this terrible design: it's just a flat plastic panel with no moving parts. You have to push the numbers to enter your PIN, but with no buttons, and no mechanical feedback, you can't just type the number in: you have to PRESS... EACH... SPOT... AND... HOLD... while the laggy touch system takes its time registering your input. A daily irritation!
VW ID. cars have the worst fake buttons on the steering wheel. Multiple buttons were merged into a single mushy creaky touch-sensitive plastic face that is inconvenient and unreliable when you press intentionally, but easy to accidentally activate by brushing your hand over it.
My gym got treadmills like this. Stupidest decision anyone could make because a large enough drop of sweat will activate the button, with the stop button being the absolute worst one to hit, because there's no "undo" - you hit stop, and you're stuck with a treadmill that's stopping and your activity is over.
A peugeot (e308?) I rented for a few weeks had that. Absolutely bonkers. When driving I normally feel my way ("max heating to get rid of fog is the third button to the left"), but with this I would also activate all other kinds of stuff all the time.
Recently changed offices at work. The new one has the same kind of buttons for the keypad. Just a flat surface with 9 numbers. I accidentally double press all the time, as it's hard to feel with no tactile feedback what you're doing and it's a bit delayed in the "beeps". So then you have to wait a few seconds and try again. Drives me mad.
I hate my dishwasher's touch buttons (Bosch 800 series) because of that. The amount of pressure you need to press a button is always ambiguous, so sometimes you press it too short and you have to press it again. Sometimes, the button registers, but you think you need to press it again, so you effectively cancel it, and must do it again. Worst UX ever.
Same with my apartment’s smart lock. The deadbolt gets extended accidentally while the door is open when someone brushes against the panel from the outside and you have to reach around the door to retract it.
I'm glad the pendulum is swinging back with this one. With UI paradigms, we seem to have this tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater, or be so intrigued with the possible new benefits we can get (buttons can change according to context!) that we forget what current benefits we would give up to get them (learnability and muscle-memory because the button always does the same thing, being able to feel your way to a button without looking at it)
It reminds me of what happened with the flat UI/anti-skeuomorphism wave a bit over a decade ago. It seemed like someone got so incensed by the faux leather in the iPhone's Find My Friends app (supposedly made to look like it had the same stitching as the leather upholstery in Steve Jobs' private jet) that they went on a crusade against anything "needlessly physical looking" in UI. We got the Metro design language from Microsoft as the fullest expression of it, with Apple somewhat following suit in iOS (but later walking back some things too) and later Google's Material Design walking it back a bit further (drop shadows making a big comeback).
But for a while there, it was genuinely hard to tell which bit of text was a label and which was a button, because it was all just bits of black or monocolor text floating on a flat white background. It's like whoever came up with the flat UI fad didn't realize how much hierarchy and structure was being conveyed by the lines, shadows and gradients that had suddenly gone out of vogue. All of a sudden we needed a ton of whitespace between elements to understand which worked together and which were unrelated. Which is ironic, because the whole thing started as a crusade against designers putting their own desire for artistic expression above their users' needs by wasting UI space on showing off their artistic skill with useless ornaments, but it led to designers putting their own philosophical purity above their users' needs, by wasting UI space on unnecessary whitespace and forcing low information density on everyone.
I don't think that while ever ended! Have you seen Jetbrains' IDEs "new UI" (now the only UI except for a soon to be deprecated plugin)? You can't tell where a tab ends and the next one begins, it's just floating text on a solid background, with slightly more space between names. They also got rid of most labels, so it became a game of guessing what each symbol could possibly mean (another provably awful trend).
And the worst is, they're likely just copying competitors because as a sibling comment days, some people see the old accesible UI and think it looks old fashioned.
Plenty of UI designers just follow trends because everyone just copies the current popular things, especially when their competition starts doing it too. They don't really put a ton of thought into it or don't do it as part of a wider cohesive strategy where it makes sense for what they are building.
Really shows the power of UI designers at big organizations like Apple, Google, and Tesla.
It's due to fashion. New tech trend comes in and companies want to use it to differentiate their products as newer so they seem more valuable. When the tech ages and becomes just another commodity the usage settles down. When blue LEDs came out every hardware company put blue LEDs everywhere but that's no longer the case as they're not fashionable. Another example is glass-look UI buttons from the first iPhones.
I'm still waiting for tech to return to the decades of UI/UX design guidelines they all ditched during what I call The (Not-So) Great Flattening.
Actionable items were indicated by a button, highlight, or underline (hyperlink!). A scrollbar showed you when there was more to see. There was consistency across all apps on a platform.
It took me a year of using Apple CarPlay to realize that if you touch the album of a song on the Now Playing part of Apple Music, it will bring you to that album's tracklist. Needless to say I felt very dumb upon discovering this so late, but I didn't feel at fault. Why?
Because when I touch the artist's name - it does nothing. When I touch the song title, it does nothing. When I touch the album art, it does nothing. All despite these having the same design style as the touchable album title. There is no reason to expect that the album title would be any different.
iOS, macOS, and Windows improved a lot, but the design is still horribly lacking in usability problems that were already solved decades ago.
IIRC Material Design actually came before iOS' pivot to Immaterial Aero We Have At Home. Metro was indeed first, though, so kudos for actually mentioning it. Everyone seems to forget that the Zune was what really got things rolling.
Interestingly, almost all designers know that touch screens in cars are bad idea. They always knew it. Bit for some reason, the designers in automotive industry were the only ones who didn’t know. It’s a mystery.
Cost. They put them in to save money. It’s not a mystery at all. Plumbing wires for a bunch of analog switches is more expensive than one databus, and then there is the simplicity of turning your hardware problem into a software one.
In addition to what others are saying, US law requires new cars to have back up cameras and the related screen. So everything else immediately becomes "so we add it to the screen we already have to have, or add a new physical control?"
On another note, I do like my (getting older) Mazda's screen. It has touch, but I honestly forget it does because the control knob is so much better for use while driving. Nice and tactile. Additionally all of the important controls have physical buttons. Only major problem I have with it is that if it can't connect to Bluetooth (which is stupidly often), it decides to switch back to radio, blasting that at me. Then I have to sit there going through multiple menus to get Bluetooth reconnected.
I've been relatively convinced that it was a cost savings measure. Both in cost of components and, probably more importantly, cost in labor of install, since touchscreens are cheaper on both regards. Everyone knew it was worse, but it saved money, and, at least for a while, it could be marketed as "premium".
The designers are not the ones who decided on that. It’s cost reduction, feature flexibility (you can decide later what exactly to provide in the software), and the marketing semblance of a cool modern interface.
I'm sure the designers in the automotive industry knew. The move to touch screens just reeks of management and marketing interference: chasing trends and shiny technology as well as prioritizing cost savings/uniformity/flexibility/etc over the final product experience.
I vividly remember a discussion with designer colleague in the early 2010s that used to work at BMW. They convinced me that touch buttons in car were awful.
They probably know, but don't have the ultimate say in the matter. As others have said, having one screen as opposed to a variety of buttons and knobs that need to be wired is likely cheaper (even more when you don't really invest in proper software development).
I know I’m going against general internet sentiment here, but having used a touch screen in a car (Tesla) for a couple years, going back to driving a more standard vehicle with 50+ inputs spread all over the car is not pleasant.
The flip side: every time I run into a car that has a screen-based UI and doesn't support touch controls, it is absolutely miserable. There is such a thing as too many tactile controls.
I specifically bought a Mazda because it's the only car that feels safe to actually use. HVAC, audio, maps, calling, absolutely everything can be done with physical controls that minimize eyes-off-road time. There's no situation where you're sticking your arm out trying to tap some tiny on-screen button to get directions. Taking rides with other people in Teslas, subarus, fords, etc, is just wild. Having to go into a menu to change from vents to defrost is crazy, I don't understand how that's even legal.
Once upon a time I used Android Auto and things were good. Most controls were in the corners, you see, which allowed me to perform a couple of changes without looking at the touchscreen.
One day, a GUI designer decided to put a horizontal bar going through the top of the display just to display a very tiny clock on the top right corner.
The top left corner I used to bring up the menu and quickly select options no longer worked reliably as it was under that horizontal strip.
I stopped using Android Auto after a couple of months.
This was one of the first lessons I learned about good UX design and was the canonical example when discussing what Mac OS classic did right and Windows did wrong.
I think it was Norman Nielson thing or one of those old school gurus.
How are people allowed to work on UIs without learning the core syllabus? The basics of their trade? I grew up on this stuff and I'm not even a UX specialist or a UI designer.
Or are they getting overridden by bad product managers and other shitty stakeholders?
This is why I may never upgrade to a vehicle newer than ~2010. I've dealt with too many consumer electronics that auto-update in ways that make them useless to me, and I'm not willing to make a car-sized purchase in the vague hope that this consumer electronic device will be the exception and will keep working for 10+ years (assuming I maintain it) in the same way as it did when I bought it.
I develop and rely on muscle memory when driving, and I'm not going to invest in muscle memory that can be changed out from under me on the whims of some product manager somewhere.
As a synthesizer enthusiast, I'm excited to read about this. A well-designed button layout on a synth sparks my creativity. Tweaking knobs on a touchscreen doesn’t work for me because I constantly have to check the screen to make sure my fingers are on the right control.
Touchscreens in cars should have been illegal to begin with it. How can it be that operating a cellphone is not allowed but operating a “tablet” is a necessity?
Touchscreens are perfectly fine on phones, tablets etc. But for something like a car it takes a special kind of idiot to implement a touch only way of controlling things like heating/ac, volume, etc.
Even for certain audio controls it makes no sense. My (fairly old now) Toyota's touch screen is needed for switch between radio and usb (no carplay/android auto), even thats annoying to use.
I am really hoping this and similar projects take off and find mass success -- and tactile controls become more widely deployed across all devices for human-input.
Just in time. Yesterday I had to use a touchscreen-based card reader for the first time to pay for something. What a jarring interaction. Impossible to use muscle memory, so I actually had to think what my PIN was and had to look at the screen the whole time, being stressed about pressing just a bit too much to the left or the right so that the wrong digit would be entered. I very much prefer classic card terminals, thank you very much.
One thing that would really get me to consider buying a Tesla is to add a few high quality _assignable_ knobs and controls that I could configure to control radio volume, heat, or whatever function I'd like. (within reason)
Oh and real indicator stalks, that would be nice too.
Yes I do prefer analog controls. Dials for heat. Open close flaps for vents. On off switches.
Tangentially: the Tesla single giant glass console is in dire need of a UX designer to take the clutter out and make it far more usable. It’s here I wish that Apple had bought Tesla many many years ago: CarPlay as they have it now where it takes over the whole screen would have been amazing.
> home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs
It can't come a bit too soon. My oven has buttons that aren't actually raised from their surroundings, and presses are registered via some sort of presumably fancy processing that I guess sounded slick when it was being pitched, but in practice means that it's very, very difficult to be confident that a button press will do anything, especially when fingers are greasy from cooking.
Oh, and sometimes whatever processor it's using gets frozen up, so I have to turn it off and back on again. But, since it's hardwired, this involves toggling a fuse. I'm sure that there are many ways that this is a better oven than the one in the many-decades-old apartment where I used to live, but I never had to re-boot that oven.
Finally, also note that an LCD screen is not needed at all in the driver's console. Analog indicators for speed, rpms and simple lights are just fine. What I would really really like to have on all vehicles is an error LCD screen that describes with full and clear details any type of malfunction. We're still stuck with error codes but hey we give owners all these fancy and unnecessary digital toys and when a problem araises we need to plug a scanner to decode what's going on with our vehicles.
The Sony WH-1000XM5 (newest version) headphones have both touch and voice controls, but they can be frustrating to use. The touch controls are meant to be easy, but they’re often too sensitive or don’t respond well. For instance, a small accidental swipe can pause or skip a song, which interrupts my music. The voice feature, "Speak-to-Chat," stops the music if it hears you talking or even singing along, which can be annoying. I usually turn off these controls because they’re more hassle than help—it’s actually easier to adjust the volume on my iPhone when I’m on a run. These controls are 10x worse than the much older versions that had volume and pause buttons on the headphones.
It seems like total lunacy to me that car manufacturers are putting essential functions (like controlling the HVAC) behind a touch screen.
With my old car, I could keep CarPay navigation on the large touchscreen while I could simultaneously turn on the seat heater and adjust the temperature by blindly hitting the physical controls. In my new car, I literally have to press the screen to bring up the HVAC UI which then overrides CarPlay (and thus hides my navigation). This is completely insane to me.
I'll be the contrarian and say I prefer touchscreens. To get some system into a touchscreen you need to digitize the whole system which allows you to control it through automation which creates a more versatile system. The system could be digitized and then have a physical control to change the state, but then it's not necessary at that point.
Let it be known that (good) designers are fully aware of how bad touchscreens are, with regards to UX and many other things.
It's just that touchscreens have been the least bad option, when you really need/want (always arguable, of course) to iterate a lot on the software, that is inside an expensive and not cheaply/easily modifiable piece of hardware.
[+] [-] praptak|1 year ago|reply
Lack of tactile feedback for the sight-impaired is the obvious part but there is another thing:
Touchscreens just stop registering your touch when you get old. The older you get the less moisture there's in your skin, which at some point makes touch screens ignore you.
https://www.gabefender.com/writing/touch-screens-dont-work-f...
[+] [-] Dwedit|1 year ago|reply
I always see my dishwasher having some bizarre setting active because of accidental contact with a touch button.
[+] [-] wlesieutre|1 year ago|reply
http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit...
[+] [-] schmidtleonard|1 year ago|reply
Bonus points for a big long click buffer and strange multi-click semantics so that once the computer unfreezes your attempts at diagnostics are redirected into messing up the state in weird and wonderful ways that you will have to unpack over the next week.
[+] [-] rkuska|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] corytheboyd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] marssaxman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pornel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tallanvor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] matsemann|1 year ago|reply
Recently changed offices at work. The new one has the same kind of buttons for the keypad. Just a flat surface with 9 numbers. I accidentally double press all the time, as it's hard to feel with no tactile feedback what you're doing and it's a bit delayed in the "beeps". So then you have to wait a few seconds and try again. Drives me mad.
[+] [-] m463|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sedatk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] drivers99|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m12k|1 year ago|reply
It reminds me of what happened with the flat UI/anti-skeuomorphism wave a bit over a decade ago. It seemed like someone got so incensed by the faux leather in the iPhone's Find My Friends app (supposedly made to look like it had the same stitching as the leather upholstery in Steve Jobs' private jet) that they went on a crusade against anything "needlessly physical looking" in UI. We got the Metro design language from Microsoft as the fullest expression of it, with Apple somewhat following suit in iOS (but later walking back some things too) and later Google's Material Design walking it back a bit further (drop shadows making a big comeback).
But for a while there, it was genuinely hard to tell which bit of text was a label and which was a button, because it was all just bits of black or monocolor text floating on a flat white background. It's like whoever came up with the flat UI fad didn't realize how much hierarchy and structure was being conveyed by the lines, shadows and gradients that had suddenly gone out of vogue. All of a sudden we needed a ton of whitespace between elements to understand which worked together and which were unrelated. Which is ironic, because the whole thing started as a crusade against designers putting their own desire for artistic expression above their users' needs by wasting UI space on showing off their artistic skill with useless ornaments, but it led to designers putting their own philosophical purity above their users' needs, by wasting UI space on unnecessary whitespace and forcing low information density on everyone.
[+] [-] phreack|1 year ago|reply
And the worst is, they're likely just copying competitors because as a sibling comment days, some people see the old accesible UI and think it looks old fashioned.
[+] [-] dmix|1 year ago|reply
Really shows the power of UI designers at big organizations like Apple, Google, and Tesla.
[+] [-] brikym|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TheKarateKid|1 year ago|reply
Actionable items were indicated by a button, highlight, or underline (hyperlink!). A scrollbar showed you when there was more to see. There was consistency across all apps on a platform.
It took me a year of using Apple CarPlay to realize that if you touch the album of a song on the Now Playing part of Apple Music, it will bring you to that album's tracklist. Needless to say I felt very dumb upon discovering this so late, but I didn't feel at fault. Why?
Because when I touch the artist's name - it does nothing. When I touch the song title, it does nothing. When I touch the album art, it does nothing. All despite these having the same design style as the touchable album title. There is no reason to expect that the album title would be any different.
iOS, macOS, and Windows improved a lot, but the design is still horribly lacking in usability problems that were already solved decades ago.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] karmonhardan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] josefrichter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Laremere|1 year ago|reply
On another note, I do like my (getting older) Mazda's screen. It has touch, but I honestly forget it does because the control knob is so much better for use while driving. Nice and tactile. Additionally all of the important controls have physical buttons. Only major problem I have with it is that if it can't connect to Bluetooth (which is stupidly often), it decides to switch back to radio, blasting that at me. Then I have to sit there going through multiple menus to get Bluetooth reconnected.
[+] [-] MostlyStable|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tikhonj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] StephenAmar|1 year ago|reply
They totally knew.
[+] [-] amelius|1 year ago|reply
Fast forward a decade, and now buyers want buttons.
[+] [-] creesch|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] steveoscaro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewdgreen|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xyst|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yabones|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] HerbMcM|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|1 year ago|reply
I think it was Norman Nielson thing or one of those old school gurus.
How are people allowed to work on UIs without learning the core syllabus? The basics of their trade? I grew up on this stuff and I'm not even a UX specialist or a UI designer.
Or are they getting overridden by bad product managers and other shitty stakeholders?
[+] [-] lolinder|1 year ago|reply
I develop and rely on muscle memory when driving, and I'm not going to invest in muscle memory that can be changed out from under me on the whims of some product manager somewhere.
[+] [-] lwn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] elwebmaster|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] esskay|1 year ago|reply
Even for certain audio controls it makes no sense. My (fairly old now) Toyota's touch screen is needed for switch between radio and usb (no carplay/android auto), even thats annoying to use.
[+] [-] albert_e|1 year ago|reply
SmartKnob - Haptic input knob with software-defined endstops and virtual detents
https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37448659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30646886
I am really hoping this and similar projects take off and find mass success -- and tactile controls become more widely deployed across all devices for human-input.
[+] [-] TonyTrapp|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m348e912|1 year ago|reply
Oh and real indicator stalks, that would be nice too.
[+] [-] gigatexal|1 year ago|reply
Tangentially: the Tesla single giant glass console is in dire need of a UX designer to take the clutter out and make it far more usable. It’s here I wish that Apple had bought Tesla many many years ago: CarPlay as they have it now where it takes over the whole screen would have been amazing.
[+] [-] JadeNB|1 year ago|reply
It can't come a bit too soon. My oven has buttons that aren't actually raised from their surroundings, and presses are registered via some sort of presumably fancy processing that I guess sounded slick when it was being pitched, but in practice means that it's very, very difficult to be confident that a button press will do anything, especially when fingers are greasy from cooking.
Oh, and sometimes whatever processor it's using gets frozen up, so I have to turn it off and back on again. But, since it's hardwired, this involves toggling a fuse. I'm sure that there are many ways that this is a better oven than the one in the many-decades-old apartment where I used to live, but I never had to re-boot that oven.
[+] [-] liendolucas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickhogan1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _0xdd|1 year ago|reply
With my old car, I could keep CarPay navigation on the large touchscreen while I could simultaneously turn on the seat heater and adjust the temperature by blindly hitting the physical controls. In my new car, I literally have to press the screen to bring up the HVAC UI which then overrides CarPlay (and thus hides my navigation). This is completely insane to me.
[+] [-] fasteddie31003|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] numerative|1 year ago|reply
As for my car, that's the only touch interface; all else is old school tactile button and knobs.
I am starting to wonder how drivers of the modern teslas and similar feel about all touch interface in their cars.
[+] [-] jstummbillig|1 year ago|reply
It's just that touchscreens have been the least bad option, when you really need/want (always arguable, of course) to iterate a lot on the software, that is inside an expensive and not cheaply/easily modifiable piece of hardware.