praptak 9 days ago | next |

Touchscreens are anti-accessibility.

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...

phrenq 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

At a former company, we were all issued YubiKey Nanos, which just never worked for me. None of my coworkers had a problem, but I couldn’t get the damn thing to register a touch no matter what I did, including swapping keys. Eventually I came across a thread on an internal list for employees over forty, with several other people who were all having the same problem. The solution? Lick your finger. Gross, but it did the trick. And I’m stuck licking my finger every time I need to make a YubiKey work.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I wonder if that explains the stereotype of old people licking their fingers to turn pages

coldtea 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

It's not a stereotype and it's not really a mystery.

Licking or wetting your fingers for this purpose has been a standard practice across the globe, when people are dealing with turning pages (e.g. for accounting), counting tickets, coupons, paper money, etc. It was never just something older people did (except in the sense that the practice is not as common now, as people in the US and Europe don't need to do it that much anymore, due to changes like reduced use of cash, etc.).

So, you might not have seen it since the need is mostly obsolete in most of the west, but it's still a thing elsewhere, and was very much a thing in the US and Europe too until a few decades back.

So much so, that there were office gadgets made for this, basically a base holding a small sponge, that you would add water to, and use it to wet your fingers for counting/changing pages. They're still very much sold:

https://www.amazon.com/money-counting-sponge/s?k=money+count...

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm not stranger to licking my fingers when dealing with cash, or licking stamps and envelopes, etc. but the way some old people do it was always a little mystery to me. I'd see them taking a second or three to quite conspicuously stick their tongue out and slowly lick their finger every single time before turning a page or a banknote. I always figured it's just a force of habit, but they're doing it in maximum power-save mode, and are way past giving a fuck about how gross it looks to everyone around them. I never considered that maybe they really need to do it this way to keep their fingers moist.

(That realization scares me, as it means I too might become an obnoxious finger-licker in a few years.)

coldtea 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

>I always figured it's just a force of habit, but they're doing it in maximum power-save mode, and are way past giving a fuck about how gross it looks to everyone around them.

That's the other thing about it, when it was being done in the past: people weren't so appealed by having bodies, or frightened of life and anything that's not sterile.

So they weren't as grossed out by everything - including a person merely licking their fingers to count some pages or notes...

justinclift 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Maybe a key chain instead with a moistened pad that doesn't easily go dry? :)

rtkwe 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

There’s a whole little range of forgotten/dead products for this. It looks just like a tiny pot of Carmex or other lip balm and it coats your finger to make it that tiny bit more grippy to make handling loads of paper easier. No idea what it’s name is haven’t seen it in 20 years since I stopped having to hang around the church offices while my parents did choir practice.

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Honestly, and in line with a reply upthread[0], fresh saliva may be more sanitary. I mean, it has some non-zero antimicrobial properties, plus it doesn't accumulate random stuff that could grow over time.

Yeah, I'm starting to understand why old people may be past the point of giving a damn about the optics.

--

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42036400

loco5niner 8 days ago | root | parent |

Please no... at least with cash. Cash is one of the dirtiest things out there. You don't even want to think about how dollar bills get dirty.

Source: bank teller training years ago. We were supplied (always) with little moistening pads at our tills.

doubled112 8 days ago | root | parent |

I've seen tons cash come out of bras, socks and other crevices, and I was just working at a gas station. Let your imagination run wild!

Clamchop 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The "sanitary" replacement is a wax, I always just knew it as sortkwik (? It's been a while), that you dip your fingers in. I'm sure it's still a thing for literal paper pushers to this day.

Sanitary in quotes since I'm not sure a pot of wax collecting stuff from your fingers for months or years is much better than licking.

rjh29 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Those sponges can be seen at every Japanese supermarket, to assist in opening tear-off plastic bags, because licking one's fingers is taboo. In a similar way, birthday cards need to be closed with tape rather than licked.

mr_toad 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I wonder if touching a wet sponge which has been touched by hundreds of others is more hygienic? Maybe they add antiseptic.

shiroiushi 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

I think the idea is that you aren't putting your dirty fingers in your mouth, or your spit on stuff that other people might handle. The latter really doesn't matter scientifically I think, but the former probably does.

People put their fingers on all kinds of things other people have touched: doorknobs, elevator buttons, shopping basket/cart handles, etc. Adding a moist pad to that isn't going to change anything. Keeping people's hands out of their mouths, however, might.

swah 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I think COVID-times ended that habit quickly around my city. I used to lick my finger to open plastic bags on the supermarket and now try to find something wet instead - usually alcohol bottle.

(I'm asure it was always a bit nasty but when it became a deadly move, my habits finally changed...)

basscomm 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

> I used to lick my finger to open plastic bags on the supermarket and now try to find something wet instead - usually alcohol bottle.

I just find something cold in my cart and use the condensation to wet my fingers

otteromkram 8 days ago | root | parent |

I touch a drop of water coming out of the produce sprayer, if available.

(No, I don't touch the sprayer, just a drop.)

luuurker 8 days ago | root | parent | prev |

On softer plastic bags, stretching the plastic near the opening usually allows you to open it. Does a little bit of damage though.

michaelcampbell 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> It was never just something older people did

no, but older people often tend to dryer less sensitive skin, so I'd wager it's skewed that direction. Source: am approaching "old".

MikeTheGreat 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Yes, it does.

Source: when I was 5 I saw my grandmother, RIP, doing that and asked her about it. She explained that as she got older her fingers got drier, and now it's just easier to flip pages that way.

BlandDuck 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I can also be used to poison people who read forbidden books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Rose

markman 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I get it now: Jorge had laced its pages with poison, correctly assuming that a reader would have to lick his fingers in order to turn them.

Nice pull.

denotational 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I just finished reading this last night at 01:30; what a book!

ttepasse 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm a little bit envious. Reading such a great book for the first time.

I recommend re-reading it in a few years. Ecos books grow with you; the more you learn about the world and history, the more you'll find in nuance in that book. Maybe more true for me - as a teenager I've read it first as a mostly weird detective story. Later re-reads made me more interested in the weird parts.

There is, by the way, a separately published Postscript to the Name of the Rose with some notes on writing the book.

wruza 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

There’s a whole “fingertip moistener [pad]” thingy if you need it often. Cashiers and secretaries often use them at work.

thih9 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Off topic, a dog’s wet nose also works. Surprisingly useful on walks, e.g. when a poop bag won’t cooperate in a critical moment and licking your fingers is not an option.

girvo 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

That is a genuinely useful tip, considering the circumstances I've run into! Don't _really_ want to lick my fingers while dealing with dog poop, but the bags are a pain to open sometimes

mrkstu 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Its also the only way I can open a plastic bag in the meat section of Costco.

gessha 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I was shopping at a grocery store and a lady saw me visible distraught by not being able to open a clear bag and she told me to touch some of the produce I’m about to pick up or the moisture around them. Never had the problem again. Thank you, random lady!

dtonon 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

A similar lady some time ago helped me with a different suggestion: stretch the edge a little near the side and blow in. Problem solved.

eCa 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Or if you have something cold in your cart already, with condensation (cold drinks, ice cream etc).

Tagbert 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

One of our local grocery stores has a different brand of plastic bag, This one has a small adhesive spot between the layers near the opening of the bags. As you pull the bag off, the adhesive pulls the next bag open a little bit. Each bag is slightly open when you pull it off. It works surprisingly well.

I may try to suggest that the other grocery stores adopt this brand but they are big national chains and I doubt they would be interested.

for reference, this bag says PULL-N-PAK® Titan Supreme 28-2024-11-2 www.crownpoly.com

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent |

I've seen several different solutions to this problem over the decades, and they all have one thing in common: they quickly get value-engineered out of existence.

There's always a fraction of a cent to be saved by adding slightly less adhesive, using slightly cheaper plastic, replacing the perforating tool less often, etc.; couple iterations in, the solution stops working reliably. There's no back pressure, because it's not like anyone is choosing where they shop by whether the single-use plastic bags are easy to open.

hn72774 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Rubbing the opening side of the bag between your palms generates static and opens it too. Learned that from a meat department employee who saw me struggling one day.

Moru 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I used to do that too. But now the plastic bags are gone and there is these paper bags with slightly offset edges att he opening. Really neat invention, why didn't we do that before? :-)

tzs 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Same at Walmart. I've never successfully opened one of those without wetting my fingers.

Oddly, the plastic bags in the produce section do not have that problem. I now just grab one of those and use it for my meat.

phrenq 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

That’s funny, I hadn’t thought of that. It very well might be true that turning pages is easier for people with more moisture in their skin.

zxexz 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Yes this is very much the reason. It gets dry where I am in the winter, and it never occurred to me to do this. An older gent in a coffee shop once watched me try to turn a page, and enlightened me. I’ve met more than a few people who have a dedicated finger glove for turning pages :)

buran77 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Wet sponges [0] for people counting money were a very common sight some decades ago before money counting machines and mostly electronic payments. Probably still being used just not so obvious anymore. Regardless of age fingertips will eventually get too dry as the paper absorbs all the moisture and flipping pages or separating banknotes becomes hard.

For touchscreens dry fingers are also called "zombie finger" [1]. The screen registers the too minute change in electrical field as noise and rejects the touch event. Some sweat (but not too much) on the fingers makes all the difference.

[0] https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/sponge-finger-wet...

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/06/zombie-fing...

freedomben 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I'm also in a dry climate, and even as a teenager I often had to lick my fingers in order to get the plastic bags at the grocery store open (I was a bagger so had to do it all day). Eventually we got smart and started putting wet sponges by the bags, which is also an amazing life hack if you have trouble turning pages.

markman 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

This thread is so long. It started with tactile buttons being back yet it's mainly about opening plastic bags. I like that. I think that's funny.

arccy 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

so books are not accessible: kindles are better

kibwen 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm unclear if this was intended to be sarcastic, but it's certainly possible for e-readers to be more accessible than books, at least for models that actually have physical buttons (and especially considering that e-readers can have zoomable text).

InsideOutSanta 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

As far as I can tell, none of the current Kindle models have physical page turn buttons anymore, which is insane to me.

Turning the page is the main thing I do on an ebook, having a button on the side is so much more convenient than touching the screen, I don't obscure what I'm looking at, and I don't smudge the screen.

kridsdale3 8 days ago | root | parent |

The BOOX Palma is an e-ink Android device (not a phone) that I run the Kindle app on. It has physical page buttons, and is better than any of the Kindle devices I've used. Also tunable ink speed and color temperature.

dotancohen 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I am actually reading this on an e-reader. I find it more accessible than either my phone or my desktop. And easier on the eyes.

freedomben 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Maybe not accessible in the a11y sense, but definitely accessible in the "can read without DRM" sense. I'll take a book I can keep and read whenever and however I want to one that has to phone home and ask a giant corporation if it's ok.

Projectiboga 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Ah I'm 56, the touch screen on my phone has gotten finicky. I'll have to see if that would help in a pinch. I wouldn't want to rely on that all the time but under time pressure it is good to know about that.

szszrk 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm almost 40, some years ago I noticed that at winter I get more frustrated with my phones and start thinking of changing them.

It turned out each winter I make screens much more dirty and my fingers are drier. Touch gets more random, fingerprint readers success rate drops from 100% to more like 50%.

Nowadays I make sure I clean the screen with actual dedicated products often, and make sure I keep hands moisturized. It works well, even if the latter contributes to the former.

Haven't changed phone in over 2 years and still don't feel the need for change :)

jjtheblunt 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

i thought possibly bloodflow is less prevalent on the surface of your fingers in cold weather, and finger touches are harder to detect as a result, but i don't have data or proof.

dotancohen 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

You should really look at the S series by Samsung. I've been using Note devices since the Note 3, I would not give up the stylus for anything at this point.

notpushkin 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Not sure if it’s available on your phone, but look for a High touch sensitivity option in display settings. Helps me a lot in winter.

planckscnst 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

You can also use some other part of your body that has moisture. My nose and my scalp are really oily, so I can rub my finger on my nose and then do the touch controls and fingerprint sensors and have it work

mewpmewp2 9 days ago | root | parent |

Glad it didn't end with what where my imagination went.

werdnapk 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

When my pixel 7 doesn't recognize my fingerprint, I press my thumb on the side of my nose to pick up a bit of skin oils and then my thumb print is recognized.

luuurker 8 days ago | root | parent |

The Pixel 7 series has an optical sensor under the display. I wonder how some oil/cream/etc helps? The newer ones have ultrasonic sensors, so that should be better.

Kirby64 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

If your skin is dry enough it won’t make good contact with the screen so the “picture” will be bad. Adding a thin layer of oil basically acts as an optical transmission layer. Ultrasonic ones would probably have the same issue, honestly.

BobAliceInATree 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

If you’d rather not lick your finger, you can get one of those old-school sponge stamp/envelope moisteners.

endoblast 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

Or lick the back of your hand and then moisten the finger on that. More discreet and more hygienic (well, hygienic for you at least).

Izkata 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I'm not as old as everyone else here is mentioning, but started having this issue a few years ago with my phone. My fix was to rub my hands together for a few seconds. Don't know why but it's always worked for me.

mh- 9 days ago | root | parent |

I'm curious if you have issues with pulse oximeters too. The thing they use to check your blood oxygen level when you go to the doctor.

I don't tend to have the issues everyone here is talking about, but those things never work for me on the first try.

hawski 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Would breathing on it (wide open mouth air blow, I'm not a native speaker) work as well but be contactless way of achieving it?

montag 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

“Breathing on” works as you intended (like breathing on a cold window to make it foggy); the alternative “blowing on” does not.

lisper 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> I'm not a native speaker

You got it (mostly) right :-) Just one minor mistake: a native would write, "Would breathing on it be a contactless way..." in order to indicate that this is only one of several possibilities. You could also say, "Would breathing on it be the contactless way..." in order to indicate that this was the only possibility.

The rule here is really weird. The qualifier is only required when there is a singular noun being used as an object. "Breathing is way of doing it" sounds weird, but "Breathing and licking are ways of doing it" does not.

"English is super-weird" sounds right. "English is super-weird language" sound weird.

montag 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It would be amazing if Yubico offered a physical button option.

I really hope it’s not the case that capacitive sensors are somehow preferred from a security standpoint (i.e., harder to trigger with a robot).

marcosdumay 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

There exist some "artificial tongues" that people use to turn pages. It's a rosin-like substance that comes in a small can.

deepsun 9 days ago | root | parent |

There exist artificial fingers to tap smartphones, sold in cold climates, so you don't need to take off gloves. Regular sausages in their packaging work great.

cbzbc 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

You can effectively get these surfaces built into the glove, a number of companies sell such things.

mirekrusin 9 days ago | root | parent |

Why they don't need to be wet?

cbzbc 9 days ago | root | parent |

To activate a touchscreen they simply need to have capacitive properties.

mirekrusin 9 days ago | root | parent |

Interesting, it sounds like they should try to invent something that works in similar way to nerves on the skin as you can feel slightest touch regardless of moisture.

Reason077 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I used to have some woollen winter gloves with built in touch-screen fingertips. They worked well, but also made things quite slippery when holding a phone. This once resulted in a shattered screen when the phone slipped out of my gloved hand and flew onto a cold, hard, London pavement…

Moru 9 days ago | root | parent |

How cold does it get with you? I have tried all sorts of touch-screen gloves and they all stop working below -5 C. The cheap touch-pencils still work though so carry one of those around my neck if I need the phone outdoors.

pipes 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Great! I'm in my forties and my laptop finger print scanner seems really temperamental, I'll try licking my finger!

joecool1029 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I used to rub the side of my nose briefly to make fingerprint reader work on thinkpads, I think this coats the finger with enough oil to make it work reliably.

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

It works for my phone's fingerprint scanner. I used to have issues with it, and eventually thought it might be caused by the extra "safety glass" glued on top of the screen. Then one day, after another failed fingerprint unlock attempt, I noticed a text on the screen suggesting to moisten my finger. It must have been added in some system update, and I'm very thankful for that, or else I'd have to wait until this HN thread to figure this out.

NavinF 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Have you checked your A1C (average blood sugar)? I wonder if this is caused by low blood circulation near the surface of your skin.

"Excess blood sugar decreases the elasticity of blood vessels and causes them to narrow, impeding blood flow"

wildrhythms 9 days ago | root | parent |

I think it's just dry skin. When I worked in corporate IT we had the same issue with Yubikey 'not working' and almost all of those issues came from people working in an especially arid part of the country. "Lick your finger" fixed it every time.

DavideNL 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Lick your finger.

Exactly, i do the same thing with my (new) Macbook Air, it makes the TouchID sensor work much more reliable (also, i use my middle finger by the way...)

da768 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The device it's connected to also has an impact, IIRC M1 MacBook Pro 14 wouldn't let me trigger my YubiKey without a USB hub

justsomehnguy 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

real life verification can

/s but not so much

EDIT: back in the day cashiers had a thing to moisture your fingers flipping the bills/notes/papers

creesch 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Yeah, some touch buttons work through conductivity and are really sensitive. Fittingly for this post, our cloths dryer has a touch "screen" which is to say that it is a slab of plastic with icons that are touch sensitive. Often enough, I can't get them to register a touch unless I press really hard or if I wet my finger first.

6510 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

uhh how to describe this... you can control how much saliva you push to the front of your mouth when you spit. The correct amount is next to nothing. Rubbing your thumb over your index finger spreads the moisture and provides feedback.

(I have to open countless garbage bags, licking is not an option)

Log_out_ 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

User accounting the with the sibling system.lick the device to prove its your cake or you are thoroughly protected from being thoroughly grossed out by growing up with siblings .

ho_schi 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I can confirm the troubles with age. Another problem are cold and hot environments (sweat).

Anyway. Tactile input is generally better where an efficient placement of physical input controls is possible.

Garmin is a seldom example of a company doing it right with the Edge 840. They merged the tactile 530 and the touch 830 into one device. The best of both worlds. Guess what I prefer?

It is the Edge 530. Better screen to body ratio :)

The rise of the touchscreens are an accident. Because MBAs believe iPhone == touch == good. It isn’t. The iPhone is just small, physical switches expensive (remember the slider smartphones) and you can merge output with input (this a pro and a con). Nice when you want to zoom a map. Horrible if Okay changes the position, worse when the keyboard requires the half screen and interaction is generally ineffective.

I recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things

    1. Layout your tactile interface in a way that it allows the user to create a mental model of it.
    2. In best case this model exists already.
    3. Make it hard to use it wrong.
    4. Make it easy to use it right.
    5. Also applies to the output. If the turn indicator is ON, make it ON.
PS: Right now I struggle to hide my touch keyboard. No „DONE“ or „HIDE“ and I cannot access my bookmarks for my recommendation.

Can I express an wish?

Dear device manufacturers. Please used high quality switches with travel, resistance and a click „BIPPITY-BUMP“. Add a spring. Built in a indicator light within!

thomassmith65 9 days ago | root | parent | next | 

  The rise of the touchscreens are an accident. Because MBAs believe iPhone == touch == good. It isn’t.
Amen! There so many flaws to touchscreens.

With the most common touchscreen implementations:

• user must hover hand above screen to avoid errant 'clicks' which is physically tiresome during prolonged use

• user cannot locate button without looking at screen, and feedback, if any, is several ms delayed (ie: till audio 'click' sound plays)

• user cannot easily control GUI on large, or multiple displays, since input-to-output scale is 1-to-1

• user cannot view the content under the target without workarounds (eg: iOS's loop widget) since user's finger blocks part of screen, and a human finger is relatively large compared to screen

meindnoch 9 days ago | root | parent |

>iOS's loop widget

You mean the magnifying glass during text selection?

thomassmith65 9 days ago | root | parent |

Oops, maybe the spelling is 'loupe', but yes.

thfuran 8 days ago | root | parent |

It is. And outside of contexts where a particular trade or profession uses them as a tool, they're typically called magnifying glasses.

thomassmith65 8 days ago | root | parent |

I don't know for certain, but I suspect Adobe introduced its 'loupe tool' in 1987 when it released Photoshop. Whether or not 'loupe' is pretentious, it is now a ubiquitous term in the software industry. It's also four syllables shorter than 'magnifying glass' which, in my view (and when correctly spelled!), absolves it.

flyingcircus3 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Perhaps there were multiple iterations of the Garmin Edge 530, and we're talking about two different interfaces, but this is the process for zooming and panning the map on my Edge 530:

From the map screen, to change zoom, hold a button until a +/- appears next to other buttons. Use those other buttons to zoom in or out. To pan up or down, hold that same button again, until up/down arrows appear next to the other buttons. Use those other buttons to pan up or down. To pan left or right, repeat this process once more.

The entire value proposition of a bike mounted map is to be able to navigate without stopping to use your phone. But if the interface to adjust the map is this cumbersome, stopping to look at a phone is the smart move, never mind the better user experience.

ho_schi 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Good point! I still call that an Easter Egg because it is hidden. It took me months until I figured out that a long press on Enter allows movement of the map viewpoint. And then there is the sub menu providing the same feature.

For outsiders:

You’re move the map by turning your handlebar and riding in another direction. It automatically follows your position, heading and zooms in an out (depending on travel speed and upcoming turns). And routes are planned ahead of time on the computer (i. e. GPX) because you usually don’t want the shortest route between to points.

So the feature flyingcircus is mentions isn’t needed?

It is seldom needed. You can use it if a road is blocked to search the area for alternatives or looking for another riders current position (GroupTrack is awesome and complicated to setup) if far away.

The 840 (buttons + touch) solves that, for twice the price and is bigger/heavier. Or if you want avoid touch, more buttons :)

The old eTrex series feature a kind of TrackPoint serving as cursor-keys and enter-keys. I kept mine, because it shows many good design decisions (AA-Batteries, SD-Card, TrackPoint…) but of course it cannot compete with the Edge 530 (Turn-By-Turn Nav, Training-Status, Sensors, WiFi…).

An Edge with this kind of TrackPoint would be awesome.

II2II 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> The rise of the touchscreens are an accident. Because MBAs believe iPhone == touch == good.

Which they are, given the application. It also goes beyond size and cost. How long will those tactile buttons last, particularly given that the device is meant to be used frequently and is frequently stuffed into a pocket?

Don't get me wrong. I have an ereader with buttons because I like buttons. Yet those buttons are not going to endure the same amount of abuse as they would on a phone.

justinclift 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> How long will those tactile buttons last

Button manufacturers rate their products for this kind of thing. ie. "10k cycles" (not that high), "1M cycles" (better), etc.

So it really depends upon the device manufacturer to pick something appropriate.

Random examples:

• https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/push-button-switches/1336473

Datasheet for that has 10k cycles: https://docs.rs-online.com/512f/0900766b8137f3b1.pdf

• https://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/push-button-switches/1759621

Datasheet for that lists 1M cycles: https://docs.rs-online.com/4ef8/0900766b81680212.pdf

tirpen 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> How long will those tactile buttons last

I can say without a doubt that I've had more touchscreens fail on me in my life than buttons. This is despite buttons being far more common for most of my lifespan.

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> How long will those tactile buttons last, particularly given that the device is meant to be used frequently and is frequently stuffed into a pocket?

Decades. Which I guess is too much for a world that's driven by "value engineering".

I mean, we actually have hard data for this. "Dumb phones" (even those that would run J2ME and had apps and stuff) can easily last for decades, and their buttons work fine after 5+ years of intensive use[0]. In contrast, it's rare to find someone whose smartphone lasted more than a year without getting its screen cracked, or three years without at least one screen replacement job.

--

[0] - I would know - I graduated high school around when the first iPhone was released. If you weren't of similar age at that time, then believe me when I say it: there is no tougher test for durability of a phone keyboard than having been used by a teenager back then. There was no Messenger or WhatsApp, phone calls were expensive, and videocalls were the thing for super rich, so all the friendships and romance of that age meant texting 24/7, hammering the shit out of the keyboard, day in, day out, for years. Never once heard of anyone's keyboard breaking under the load.

eurleif 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

In your personal experience, does no one use phone cases or what?

ho_schi 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

This is outsourcing a problem solution to the user. And the covers are a mere workaround.

   * Shall not be needed for a well designed device.
   * Covers are ugly.
   * Make devices even bigger than they are already.
   * Don’t protect against high forces.
Don’t get me wrong. A cover reduces the risks. My phone is alive despite I don’t use one but that is luck (and some care).

Manufacturers get away with weird design decisions.

   * Hard (fragile) screens. Somewhat okay?
   * Camera lenses extending out of device body.
   * Camera bump extending out of device body.
   * Glued sealant instead of replaceable sealing rubber (Apple *does not* guarantee that the iPhone survives water - the glued sealant ages).
   * Glas backside to make it more fragile. Which improves Qi-Charging needed for metal bodies. Which wouldn’t be needed with polymers bodies.
And then there is the Nokia 5110. Surfing everything except water. And the next gen? Nokia built the antenna inside because they improved it. The didn’t sold „more is better“. Nokia improved the device itself :)

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Of course everyone is using phone cases - without them, hardly any smartphone would last a month without needing a screen replacement.

(It was better a decade ago, when smartphones were still thick and made of hard plastic. Now that they're all thin and metal, they're too slippery to handle safely.)

oblio 9 days ago | root | parent |

I'm not using a phone case, never have. You can have a smartphone for many years if you don't mind micro-scratches. Just don't drop it too often from too high up.

alpaca128 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> it's rare to find someone whose smartphone lasted more than a year without getting its screen cracked, or three years without at least one screen replacement job

How? I've used smartphones without any case since the Galaxy S1 and I have never had a cracked screen.

But yeah, I definitely prefer physical keys too. Since the Blackberry Passport every newer phone was a disappointment. If they made a new one with updated hardware and unlocked Android I'd preorder it immediately.

vagrantJin 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

> never had a cracked screen

That is interesting. People usually just buy screen protectors and call it a day since screens are pretty fragile and phones hate gravity.

Possible reason/s for not having a cracked screen for 15 years:

1) No kids around

2) No wife/fiancé around

3) not much of a social life

4) never walked in public with phone in use

5) phone only used in certain places with carpets to cushion fall.

6) only ever had 2 smartphones. The other is the beefy CAT phone.

7) not a sports fan

8) the phone is hardly ever used for anything more than a simple call or text.

Is it any of the above?

TeMPOraL 8 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> How? I've used smartphones without any case since the Galaxy S1 and I have never had a cracked screen.

The only smartphone in my close circles I know to have outlasted its usefulness without having its screen cracked is an LG P350 - my first ever smartphone (which incidentally was barely powerful enough to run its own OS; from then on, I always just saved up money and bought a flagship). Since then, I've seen friends getting new Pixels one day, and breaking their screens the next; in the Galaxy line alone, I had my S4 screen replaced twice, I personally replaced the screen in my wife's S3, my S7 died with a black screen after hitting the pavement (it was in a case, but the impact angle was unlucky); my wife just got the screen replaced on her S23. A family member broke a new Galaxy Tab when their briefcase hit the ground, etc. Same for cheaper devices too.

(EDIT: well, OK, my wife's Huawei P8 didn't live long enough to get its screen broken - 6 months in, it wasn't able to make a phone call without freezing. Replaced it with an S9, whose screen theoretically never cracked - instead, at some point, top half of the display got hue-shifted towards pink.)

Things got much worse when phones became glass/metal instead of glass/plastic; I personally am not brave enough to operate a modern smartphone without a case while standing on hard floor (bathroom tiles, or pavement outside).

I don't know - maybe myself and people around me all have really bad luck? Regardless, before smartphones, neither the screen nor the buttons were particularly fragile; you only ever worried about breaking the plastic case (or the flip mechanism in flip phones) after using the phone as a hammer one too many times...

II2II 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Feature phones were entirely different beasts. Screens were typically smaller, and much better protected (either with a platic window covering the screen or by the keyboard folding over the screen, which also protected the buttons). Likewise, the buttons tended to be much better protected (either when folded closed, or by having a keyboard on a slider). On top of that, they were very user hostile. Consider your texting example. Between cost and size, most people were repeatedly bashing each key on a numeric keypad to get a single letter. Few phones had touch screens (the screens were too small for them to be practical), so navigating through options was considerably more difficult.

Oh, I know that alternatives existed. Complete keyboards. Larger screens (but by no means large by current standards) with touch input complimenting the keyboard. I had one of them. Yet it was nothing compared to what we have today, and I doubt that we could have what we have today with what we had then (buttons!) without seriously compromising the size of the device or the durability of those buttons.

lukeschlather 9 days ago | root | parent |

I've got a BlackBerry Key2 that runs Android. The only reason I am about to replace it is that it has a locked bootloader and I can't upgrade Android, and several key apps I rely on have dropped support for Android 8. (Hooray for "secure" bootloaders.)

It was made in 2019, if I could hand it to you I think you'd reconsider your beliefs about what is and isn't possible, it's a very well-made device, the keyboard is lovely. It has one pretty fun feature which might be counter to the spirit of this thread - the entire keyboard is touch-sensitive and functions as a touchpad area. Software support for this is hit-or-miss, but I'm going to miss it when I have to get rid of it for an all-touch device. Especially I will miss being able to easily use my phone when there's rain drizzling.

kanbankaren 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Dear device manufacturers. Please used high quality switches with travel, resistance and a click „BIPPITY-BUMP“. Add a spring. Built in a indicator light within!

Essentially, you are asking what the avionics industry is already doing. Just look at the cockpit of a plane.

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent |

Unfortunately, if you then look at the price tag attached to that plane, you'll know why no one else is doing it :/.

floating-io 9 days ago | root | parent |

Planes are expensive due to the difficulty of certifying them and maintaining the right to sell them under various regulations, not because they're using physical switches.

TeMPOraL 9 days ago | root | parent |

Yes, but large price and low volume (and actual technical acceptance criteria) also means they're not gonna be obsessing over saving fractional cents on control panels.

listenallyall 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

MBAs? Biggest advocates I've seen for touchscreen are product designers, they tend to be obsessed with perfectly flat, unobstructed surfaces.

oblio 9 days ago | root | parent |

Designers can be the bane of usability. Small text is an example. There's a strong conflict between "design for usability" and "design for looks". Function versus form.

dimal 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> She started getting frustrated, “it’s my fault, I don’t know how to use this thing properly.”

This is heartbreaking. The woman is being excluded through no fault of her own, and she blames herself. I find this to be a common for people who don’t think of themselves as disabled but are made disabled by bad interfaces. They think there must be something wrong with themselves because everyone else has such an easy time, when really it’s the technology.

the_other 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> I find this to be a common for people who don’t think of themselves as disabled but are made disabled by bad interfaces

A lot of disabled people today subscribe to the "social model of disability" [0] rather than the "medical model". Under the social model, the obstacle is not some property of the individual experiencing an access issue, but are created by a system made by other people who didn't provide alternative access methods. Society and its inventions disable, rather than the individual's condition.

Clearly, disabled people have mental or physiological conditions that produce non-mainstream access needs. None of them deny that... but the social model invites us to take a society-wide ownership of this, and to better support a wider range of access needs by default.

In contrast, the medical model tends to situate the disability within the individual, based on their physiological condition. This tends to put the ownership on the individual (or their immediate carers), which in turn tends to perpetuate exclusion and access challenges.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_model_of_disability [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_model_of_disability

dvdkon 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

This sounds like a good way to think about some disabilities (specific recognised ways of "not being normal") and very misleading and unproductive for other disabilities.

A blind person can't participate in society to the same degree that a sighted person could, but the same is true of the entire world. We can (and arguably should) make their life easier by changing society, but unless you fix the root problem, they'll forever lack visual experiences.

From another angle, life without a human society still has its challenges. Adding a society removes some and adds new ones. Some people only have problems with these new challenges, some struggle with the old as well. These two scenarios should be distinguished, perhaps by applying the "social" and "medical" models appropriately.

Sophira 9 days ago | root | parent |

> We can (and arguably should) make their life easier by changing society, but unless you fix the root problem, they'll forever lack visual experiences.

But not everybody wants to gain the experiences that would come from not having their condition. (This is especially true in the Deaf community[0], but can be seen in other communities as well.) And honestly? I feel that's a very valid viewpoint to have. The reason they "can't participate in society" to the same extent is because society doesn't let them!

Thankfully, people are starting to realise that.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/understan...

dvdkon 8 days ago | root | parent |

I know about these tendencies, but I can't be sympathetic to them. (Re)gaining hearing is a physiological improvement; those with implants can even "turn off" noise. What these deaf people may lose is a specific deaf culture, held together by current necessity. But then the sides are flipped, and they are the ones perpetuating a non-inclusive (sub-)society.

the_other 4 days ago | root | parent |

A wider society that supports Deaf culture (or even just deaf ppl) would do things like provide email or SMS support for access to essential services instead of only providing telephone support and expecting the d/Deaf ppl to bring their own translators .

NavinF 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> social model of disability

Scott Alexander convincingly argues against that model and provides a better one: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-the-social-model-of-...

dahauns 8 days ago | root | parent |

Not that I disagree with Alexander here, but sometimes it feels like I'm taking crazy pills - this kind of integrated model has been WHO standard for over twenty years.

NavinF 8 days ago | root | parent |

As he noted, many people claim to use an integrated model. It's a motte and bailey.

>I’ve never heard anyone willing to defend the actual Social Model the way it’s taught in every course, written on every website, and defined by every government agency. Everyone says they mean the Interactionist Model. Yet somehow, the official descriptions still say that disability is only social and not related to disease, and that you may only treat it with accommodations and not with medical care.

> the topic is taught in a way that only occasionally nods to such a compromise; more often the Medical Model is condemned as outdated and bigoted, and the Social Model introduced as the new, acceptable version that people should use

He quotes many sources that take the social model literally even in the 2020s

dahauns 8 days ago | root | parent |

Yeah...I actually didn't want to get all, well, "geographical", but I can't help wonder if that's a US thing? At least here in Austria, the biopsychosocial model has been standard in teaching for a long time, and while it will still take some time for the generational shift in practice to conclude, monofactorial models have generally been accepted as being obsolete.

And regarding the BPS model: I stand corrected about my agreement - the point he makes about it I very much disagree with:

>This isn’t an exact match for a model of disability; the Biopsychosocial Model is most often used to explain the causes of illness, not how it impairs people. Still, I think there is a close enough analogy that it could be easily extended to disability.

He really shoud at least have read the Beginners Guide to the WHO ICF (which is deeply rooted in the BPSM) https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/icf-beginner-s-guide...

Both the model as a model of disability and a focus on impairment can be found front and center.

NavinF 6 days ago | root | parent |

Considering that all of Scott's quoted sources are American, I wouldn't be surprised if your country doesn't have the same issue. I assure you that a lot of American institutions take the Social Model of Disability literally while claiming to use a multifactorial model.

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

[flagged]

dimal 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

That sounds like a typically glib and dismissive comment made without really trying to understand the situation.

Until relatively recently, I never thought of myself as disabled, but in the past year I found this model helpful in understanding how I’m excluded from many parts of society because I’m autistic, and autistic needs are never considered. In reality, there’s nothing wrong with me, but many aspects of society are incompatible with me.

Lucky you, that you don’t have this problem!

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent |

This is what I'm trying to explain. Society doesn't exist anywhere besides in your head. When you're somewhere being "confronted with society", it's just other people. Each one an individual like you. So what you're saying is that some other people are never considering your needs.

Dividing the world into "me" and "society" is a simplistic perspective that is far from the truth. The same for "us" and "society". It's always people, and each bears an individual responsibility as to their behaviour.

planckscnst 9 days ago | root | parent |

> Society doesn't exist anywhere besides in your head.

How do you differentiate between what exists only in your head vs what exists elsewhere?

Societies make choices that have physical and pragmatic realities associated with them. Those choices impact our everyday lives.

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> Societies make choices....

No, only people can make choices. Societies can never make choices, because they do not exist in the real world. One of the greatest mind prisons of this age is believing "societies" have any agency. It's always people, always was, always will be.

We can also give up an offering to "luck" and pray for our luck to change, since luck "makes choices" all the time. Choices which impact your everyday life much more than "society". Or we can accept that these things don't have agency.

How to differentiate between what exists in your head and elsewhere? Good question. Metaphysical. Society is an idea, an abstraction. It is only useful for us as long as we understand it doesn't really exist. Man should never be enslaved by man-made ideas. Other abstract ideas are more powerful and more beneficial. These are better to treat as real than "society".

SalmonSnarker 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

GP is mostly ranting around some methodological individualism garbage when they could have been reading about the social model of disability and finding it's not that contradictory to their stated beliefs and probably not deserving of outright dismissal.

> Individuals exist, "society" has never existed and will never exist. It's only individuals who can take actions. "Society" does not have any means at all, because it's just a mirage within the imagination of some people.

It's one of those critiques that hits really hard when you've been doing lines of cocaine off of stacks of Hayek and Mises books and doesn't really inspire anyone outside of those niches. "Oooh! Checkmate! Got you now, Statist! That's not a society! it's a collection of individuals!" etc.

If you were to say something like "an individual with impaired eye sight is not considered disabled when they have access to eye glasses. disability does not consist solely of an individual's medical impairment, but in the relationship between the individual, other individuals, and available infrastructural and technological means" maybe it'd hit better for them.

"the obstacle is not some property of the individual experiencing an access issue, but are created by a system made by other people who didn't provide alternative access methods" (roughly the same thing) is just super objectionable though /eyeroll

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent |

I'd like to say that your comment speaks for itself - in many ways. It demonstrates how somebody who holds a strong belief in "society" reacts and acts towards another person when their core belief is questioned. Your behaviour is predictable.

tpxl 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Disagree. Mandatory access ramps exists because we have decided it's a problem to be fixed by society, not the individual. The result is far greater access for people with wheelchairs.

It's not about who's at fault, it's who has to provide a solution. Society has far more means to provide a solution than each individual.

rolph 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

when you[society] create the problem in the first place, its on you to fix it.

major problem that needs fixing is leave things alone when there is no problem.

forcing new tech, standards and spec, into place so even more money,influence,control can be attained is not a solution to any problem, its a source.

oblio 9 days ago | root | parent |

How does your comment relate in any way to the wheelchair ramp comment you're replying to?

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Individuals exist, "society" has never existed and will never exist. It's only individuals who can take actions. "Society" does not have any means at all, because it's just a mirage within the imagination of some people.

It's individuals mandating the building of wheelchair ramps, it is individuals who build them, and individuals who use them. You don't need to give your nephew or niece a high paying job to make some weird theories about "society". You can instead just state the truth that some people can't walk and if you have the power you can mandate that business owners need to make their places accessible for these people.

astrocat 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Your argument is essentially that emergent properties don't exist. It's like saying "there are no such things as waves in water, just individual water molecules." Individuals are the water molecules, and "society" is the blanket term for the emergent properties that happen when a lot of people are together. The phenomena are real and have real effects and impacts. Intrinsic and environmental factors affect the system: hydrogen bonds between water molecules (intrinsic) creates the emergent phenomenon we call "surface tension" and wind (environmental) creates waves. So too in people: intrinsic attributes of individuals and connections between them as well as environmental factors affecting entire populations create emergent effects that can be observed and studied.

I suspect you mean to appeal to the recognition that, unlike water molecules, individual humans have free will and agency and the ability to make choices completely independently. I suspect you abhor the notion of 'groupthink' and excuses for behavior that are underpinned by concepts of culture and social constructs. And there is truth to these ideas, but as with most things, they are helpful as part of a broader model, and not as a totalitarian view of human behavior. We are complex creatures, in complex systems; to ignore the tendencies of our emergent behaviors is as risky as turning your back to a rough shorebreak, believing all the individual water molecules will simply be rational and choose not to hit you, only to be engulfed in a wave that really does exist.

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent |

I like your comment. Don't agree with your comparisons, but you write in a way adding to the discussion and bringing understanding.

In lack of better comparisons from myself, Santa Claus does not exist. As a concept and an idea he of course exists and has real impact on what people do and what they feel. But part of growing up is differentiating between what is real and what is lie. Enlightened adults shouldn't believe in "society", while still being aware and updated of the possible threats from people who believe in it.

Another example: "Courage" is an abstract idea, but also a very real description of acts by some people. But we all learn when we are kids to not let another kid manipulate us into doing something by saying "Do it or you're a coward!". Even kids learn this early.

astrocat 8 days ago | root | parent |

Interesting. I don't think I follow your examples, but here's my attempt to read it: It sounds like you may be using the term "real" to be mean specifically something like "tangible." Like, Santa isn't tangible because he's a fictitious character. Courage isn't tangible, it is a term that refers to an idea. It can't be isolated, bottled. And likewise, society isn't tangible either. To reference my earlier example "emergent properties" isn't tangible. Like "courage," it is a term that refers to an idea. Many things can be described by it. And the specific issue you (maybe?) take is with ascribing causality to non-tangible things, in some sense. For example, "emergent properties" didn't knock me over at the beach, a wave did. Or, the answer to "how did you defeat the dragon?" isn't "You had courage," -- it is "You stuck your sword through it's heart which ceased blood circulation and killed it." Those are the tangible actions that led to the outcome.

And that is true and a useful analysis in a lot of circumstances, like when you're asking questions of "how?" To take this back to the ancestor comment, if you're looking at "how did this wheelchair ramp get built?" you can describe the chain of events from the creation of a law to the construction of the ramp and all the individuals involved along the way making decisions and doing actions. And that is a good and useful analysis. Some tangible entity called "society" is not involved in that chain. And I think that might be your original point. And yes, that's accurate, in that kind of analysis.

So now, take that chain of events, and multiply it by, I dunno, a very large number; hell, infinity. Every outcome and the chain of individuals and actions that led up to it. How do we study this? How to we increase our understanding without having to treat every single outcome and every chain of events completely independently? You probably see where this is going already... :) We could treat every possible combination of coin tosses as an infinite set of independent events. What someone flipping a coin 10 times has to do with someone flipping a coin 1000 times isn't anything tangible - the flips, the individuals who make them, and the outcomes are independent. So... shrug and move on? Nope. We study probability. It helps us describe WHY - if 1000 people each flip a coin 1000 times, most will have a near 50/50 split heads/tails. Probability isn't tangible, but it certainly is real.

My revised argument then is: society is a concept like probability. It is like probability distributions that come from an ever-changing sea of individual opinions, predispositions, and actions. We can measure certain parts of it at points in time and review historical outcomes, and develop theories about why certain patterns are more common, certain outcomes more likely, and use this to enhance our decision making and understanding of the behaviors and tendencies of large groups of people. So to say "society isn't real" is true in the sense of tangibility, but also myopic - and like saying "probability isn't real, there are only outcomes."

Hows that?

afarviral 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Oh right. Yes, I agree that motivated individuals get the work done for themselves and others. It's just that some people don't acknowledge that we collectively own problems/solutions because they are structural (inherent to the structures of our systems /"society") and tend to blame individuals for their own problems. Of course individuals can be wholey responsible for things, e.g. a corrupt politician. But getting rid of corruption is up to other individuals (I.e. society). It's idealist to imagine that a corrupt politician should just stop being corrupt, it's realistic to overthrow them collectively with other individuals (society).

bigstrat2003 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> Mandatory access ramps exists because we have decided it's a problem to be fixed by society, not the individual. The result is far greater access for people with wheelchairs.

I think that was a bad call. Society should not shape itself for the sake of a minority of people. That's just silly.

ifokiedoke 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I forget where I read it, but this isn't a very thought-out view. _Especially_ with the example of access ramps -- yes, the ramps were originally put in after activism for better wheelchair accessibility. But who ended up using them a whole lot and benefiting from them? Parents with strollers. Would we say that the needs of parents of young children, or young children are a minority? Do we not care about their experience even when we're having a population crisis?

In hindsight, this is a pretty obvious conclusion if we would have taken a bit of extra time to consider why we might want accessibility ramps, but instead we get sidetracked by exactly the kind of thinking displayed by your comment.

When people say "accessibility is good for everyone" it's not a naive feel-good comment. It's an acknowledgement that at some point all of us could use help with accessibility (e.g. when you become a parent, when you get old, etc)

afarviral 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

No. Everyone, instead of the affected person being blamed. Of course there are those in ivory towers doing a lot of waffling but the structural/societal view is always more productive than an individualist one which is ignoring the networked nature if reality in favour of optmistic idealism (bootstraps!).

bigstrat2003 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> ignoring the networked nature if reality in favour of optmistic idealism (bootstraps!)

From my perspective, bootstrapping is reality. It is the people who deny that who are ignoring reality in favor of idealistic but false paradigms.

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> Everyone, instead of the affected person being blamed.

Who would ever blame a disabled person for their condition?

Blaming people who have nothing to do with it is exactly the modern ideology that twists people into evil.

DiggyJohnson 9 days ago | root | parent |

Just a small correction to your question, it’s more like “who would ever say a disabled person is solely responsible for providing their own accommodations?”

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent |

Good correction. In my experience, some people will say "It's society who is responsible to help the disabled person", and some people will say "It's I who am responsible to help the disabled person".

SalmonSnarker 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I've snarked at your silliness down-thread, but there is a lot of good history that gives credibility to the notion of the social model of disability.

You may enjoy "Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard" (Groce '85)

In communities where many individuals share a common sign language, deafness doesn't function as a disability in the same way it does when few individuals speak sign language.

carlosjobim 9 days ago | root | parent |

> In communities where many individuals share a common sign language, deafness doesn't function as a disability in the same way it does when few individuals speak sign language.

Isn't that somewhat obvious? If you only speak Greek, it's a disability if you're not in Greece, but an advantage if you're there.

I think it's a pity that sign language is almost never taught outside of for hearing impaired kids. Every person could have great use of sign language being commonly spoken. It lets you communicate silently and at long distances.

rubslopes 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I once saw an elderly woman trying to receive medical care at an urgent care clinic. She brought her documents and medical insurance card, but the receptionist told her she could only be checked in if she provided a two-factor authentication code from her insurance app. The woman was totally confused. It was heartbreaking to watch.

MikeTheGreat 9 days ago | root | parent |

Where do you live?

And how is this supposed to work? Like, at all? Does the urgent care place have 2FA set up for every insurance company? Just the insurance companies they accept? What about folks that don't have their phone on them (which is reasonable to forget if you need medical care urgently, even if it's not ambulance-grade urgently).

Plus, you've got the fact that the elderly are both a major market for medical services and famously techno-phobic....

rubslopes 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Brazil. In my country, technology is growing rapidly, but in an unregulated way.

On one hand, we have a modern banking system that allows instant money transfers to anyone at any time, and the government is developing its own cryptocurrency. With our electronic voting machines, the country knows election results within two hours after polls close.

On the other hand, each company, including those providing essential services, creates its own solution without any regulatory oversight. This fragmentation extends even to official government services.

In the case I mentioned, each private health insurance company freely determines its own procedures for patient check-in at affiliated clinics. With my insurance plan, my ID card is sufficient--for now.

jve 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Isn't a document (what you own) + showing up physically so you can be scanned by eyeballs already not 2FA? What better authentication you can get than that?

Izkata 9 days ago | root | parent |

Only if the document or their system has a photo of you. Usually driver's license is used for this.

cesarb 9 days ago | root | parent |

> Only if the document or their system has a photo of you. Usually driver's license is used for this.

In my experience, using the identity card is more common. Only drivers have a driver license, but nearly everybody has a identity card (and every identity card has a photo); and AFAIK, the identity card is one of the mandatory documents to get a driver license.

Izkata 9 days ago | root | parent |

Not in the US at least. My driver's license is the only thing I have with a photo of me on it. There are state non-driver IDs but they're unusual to see.

cesarb 8 days ago | root | parent |

The context was Brazil (see sibling reply a few levels up), and here indeed all identity cards have photos. Both the old per-state models and the newer federally standardized models have them, and nearly everyone has an identity card. It's not unusual to see identity cards being used everywhere; even some commercial buildings ask for (and take photos of) them from visitors (regulars have badges, and of course they had to present their identity card to get the badge).

electricwire 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

The cynical side of me wonders if its not intended to work well

rubslopes 9 days ago | root | parent |

I don’t agree with the practice, but from what I understand, they’re trying to prevent clinics from scamming insurance companies by faking clinical visits. I've heard that this is a thing that happens here.

dylan604 9 days ago | root | parent |

When the attempt to stop bad actors stops/prevents others from using it, the system is bad. Insert baby/bathwater or nose/face comments here

mh- 9 days ago | root | parent |

That was a bit difficult to parse, but I think you're saying that (some) anti-fraud systems can't afford false positives. And I would agree, point-of-use healthcare is certainly one of those systems.

tokai 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Have seen laborers and blue collar workers, my father included, that have to use their knuckles because their finger tips are too callused and dry for touchsceens. Seems like many groups have these kind of issues.

have_faith 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm not a labourer in the slightest, but I'm a rock climber though. Sometimes for up to two days after a strong session the finger print reader on my keyboard doesn't work. It always eventually starts working again :)

mark_undoio 9 days ago | root | parent |

Even indoor bouldering has had an effect for me - my thicker skin just doesn't always register well on my phone screen.

analog31 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

That's me. I'm a double bassist, a kind of blue collar laborer. ;-) It's worst during the winter. It's a shame because I prefer to use a touch screen on my laptop.

theandrewbailey 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I worked in a fast food restaurant before college. I would be on the closing crew about three or four days a week. I would usually be the one washing and scrubbing the crusty broiler parts every time.

When I got to college, they gave everyone Thinkpads with fingerprint readers. Mine had trouble reading my fingerprints for about 2 months. I guess that I scrubbed my fingerprints away with all that grease, and it took that long for my fingerprints to "regrow" enough for the sensor to recognize them.

ainiriand 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Exactly, my brother works on power lines and wears many different types of gloves, all his computer tools are button actionated.

sholladay 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I thought so too at first, but in hindsight this is a bad take.

Pinch-to-zoom was revolutionary for people with low vision. VoiceOver was revolutionary for people with no vision. Blind people ended up being early adopters of iPhones because of how much better the UX is compared to phones with physical controls, where memorization of the controls and menus is much more necessary.

The flexibility of UI enabled by touchscreens was revolutionary for people with dexterity and cognitive issues. See the Assistive Access feature, for example, which has made Jitterbug phones obsolete for many people.

Touchscreens not responding to dry skin is a real problem, though I’ve only ever seen that on cheap hardware. Testing the device is obviously necessary.

I still want physical controls for simple and common cases, such as the vents in my car. But I now think of them more in terms of convenience and safety rather than accessibility.

joe_the_user 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm a caregiver for a couple people with dexterity and cognitive issues and I'm pretty sure a physical button is the absolutely simplest thing for them as much as for anyone else. And sure, an Ipad definitely can solve some accessible issues for some things but my clients watch things on TVs and monitors rather than Ipads (even when they have them).

But more to the point, I love my clients and friends with such issues but they don't drive and shouldn't drive.

saltcured 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I have a relative with dementia who still has enough volition to want to call people and chat. It's been eye opening to see how fluctuating abilities impact use of the smartphone UX.

Periodically, I have to remind them to turn their volume up when they complain they cannot hear me. Their grip on the phone can inadvertently hold the "volume down" button.

Their reduced motor control mixes up tap versus long press and accidentally triggers all kinds of functions. I've seen the home screen littered with shortcuts accidentally created in this manner.

Somehow, they periodically managed to call me, put me on hold, and call me again. I'm sure this was not intentional, but the rapid replacement of on-screen buttons causes different functions to be activated without any real awareness of what is happening.

The "Emergency" button on a locked phone screen can be misunderstood as a sign of danger.

The random assignment of a color icon to names on a recent calls list, contact list, or favorites list can be misinterpreted as some kind of message about the health of that named individual.

I tried to disable emergency alerts, but I fear the chaos at the care home if an emergency alert comes through and triggers that horrible alert siren.

watusername 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

Assistive Access in iOS/iPadOS puts the device into a special UI with a defined list of options (calls, music, etc.). It also allows you to disable volume buttons to prevent the scenario that you mentioned.

Brian_K_White 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

All of this.

It really makes you wonder, and by that I mean it really makes me think unflattering things, about the monoculture of 26 year old infants who designed and built all of this.

thrway01234 9 days ago | root | parent |

Design over function

If they would see beyond their own circle of friends and hire someone with varied life experience, the business may actually benefit.

It's the same people who put charging ports under the mouse so that you can't use it while it is charging. Otherwise the consumers could choose to have it always plugged in, which would make it look like an "ordinary" mouse, and the designers can't allow that :-)

thrway01234 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I don't have any experience with this, but I know that some phone brands (like Doro) exists for elderly people

https://www.doro.com/en-us/

sholladay 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I wasn’t suggesting anything about driving. I brought up the car as an example of where, yes, touchscreens have gone too far and physical controls are often preferable.

TV remotes are among the most inaccessible consumer electronics devices. They can be made much better with a touchpad or a phone app or even a voice assistant. It’s still nice to have physical volume controls, of course.

skydhash 9 days ago | root | parent |

The apple tv is a nightmare to use. First, the form factor with its sharp edges. Then, the swipable area, which I had to disable. In comparison, my AVR receiver is way better: soft keys with good travel, great tacticle recognition, fit well in the hand, and practically impossible to lose. It’s not as beautiful, but it’s very practical.

sholladay a day ago | root | parent |

If you have an iPhone, go into Settings > Control Center and add the Apple TV Remote to the list.

Now your phone can act as a remote. Just swipe down from the top right to access the control center and tap the TV remote icon.

I personally like the blocky design, but a phone case can make the edges very rounded if you like that. And of course the touchpad is much improved with it being on your phone screen compared to the physical remote.

thrway01234 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

There are some cases where you actually need physical controls.

One example is card payment terminals. Vision impaired users don't know where the buttons are for entering the pin code. On a phone they could allow the phone to read out numbers, but you don't want your pin numbers to be read out loud in a public space.

sholladay a day ago | root | parent |

Once again, VoiceOver + Apple Pay blows them all out of the water. No secret numbers need to be read out loud, including your phone passcode if you use Face ID. And even if you don’t have Face ID set up, earbuds can be used.

There’s so much misunderstanding of what it’s like to be vision impaired here and what solutions are available for common tasks.

dan-0 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The opposite side of this is unpredictable or unintended behavior from too much moisture, which in my experience has been an acknowledgement with touch screens for quite some time.

As touch screens for applications started to become common, this naturally filtered into tactical and service work fields. There is an advantage in this as it allows a more compact interface that can change more easily based on what the user needs. However the down side is, in harsh fast paced environments where the user may be moving quickly and sweating, it's much harder to register intended user feedback to the interface.

The problem is not just if touch screens should be used, but also how they should be implemented. Especially on the side of general consumer electronics, like mobile phones, iOS and Android have built in interfaces for accessibility. In some cases you can get built in accessibility out of the box with very little effort, but the reality is, it takes a decent effort in most cases to get it right and users who need this behavior are not a heavy majority. This results in a deprioritization of accessibility in many mobile applications.

This gets much worse with more hardware centric devices like thermostats, ovens, refrigerators, etc which have a higher tendency to have user interfaces developed in house and lacking any accessibility. Compounding this problem, with the popularity of touch screen interfaces, and post COVID supply chain problems, many users who needed accessible functionally were (maybe still are) left without many options, likely either having to pay a heavy premium for something with usable accessibility features, but probably more realistically, just taking what they can get.

Modern technology makes accessibility easier than ever now, and enables accessibility in places that didn't previously exist, but the lack of willingness to implement accessible features on the part of some corporations is not just providing terrible accessibility, it's taking accessibility away from places where it previously existed.

Yeul 9 days ago | root | parent |

Interesting comment! I frequently run into problems with the treadmill touchscreens at my gym. Obviously this is a very sweaty environment.

I'm not at all opposed to technology but it should be superior to what it replaces.

wnevets 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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.

I had no idea that was a thing but it makes sense now that you said it. I will now be a lot more understanding when older folks have trouble using their phones, self-checkout, etc.

nuancebydefault 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

However, i thought touch screens in cars are pressure sensitive rather than measuring changes in capacity? If the press is not registered in my car, i press a little harder. You can also use it while wearing normal gloves.

That said, i use the physical knobs a lot more often, since your finger position will easily follow any moving button and nudges in rotating or shifting knobs feel super satisfying.

freedomben 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Those are actually different technologies, and I'm guessing you got used to the pressure sensitivity on older cars. They use resistive touchscreens which are cheaper. Cheap android tablets used to routinely use those instead of the capacitive touchscreens as well. It's been a while since I had to use a resistive touchscreen, and I'm glad for it.

BenjiWiebe 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Our milking robot has a resistive touchscreen. In that case it's excellent - you can spray it clean, and it still works while it's wet.

freedomben 9 days ago | root | parent |

Great point, there are situations where resistive is a lot better. I've definitely cursed my phone screen when it's raining.

GuB-42 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

It depends on the car. Mine is resistive (like yours I think) and I can just press harder, I also don't have to use my fingers, something like a capped pen works perfectly. Though these kinds of screens are considered low-end compared to capacitive touchscreens because they require a heavy touch and usually don't support multitouch, I think these are the best for cars (if you don't have physical controls).

But many modern cars (ex: Teslas) use capacitive screens like on smartphones.

raxxorraxor 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I work in the medical industry where hygiene is very important and on some days I have to disinfect my hands multiple times. Capacitive touch screens ignore me regularly. There is disinfectant that allegedly retains some moisture/fat, but they can only do so much.

But here touch screens do make sense, because they are so easy to clean. I don't need them anywhere else though.

m-p-3 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

And dangerous in cars.

There are laws forbidding us from touching our phones, but touching the embedded display is fair game? Bring back buttons, knobs and dials please. I shouldn't have to try to aim my finger at something intangible to change a setting while driving a ton of steel at 60mph.

Just knowing where the buttons are and feeling the surface of the buttons while I can keep my eyes and attention on the road is paramount.

bigstrat2003 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Honestly, even without the danger factor it's a terrible interface. Last night I was trying to operate the touch screen in my wife's car, and the slight movement of the car as she drove meant that my hand kept missing the spot I was trying to hit. So even when you're a passenger and can focus on the screen, they still are less effective than buttons!

anthonypasq 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

one of the main things i love about my mazda is that the display is not a touch screen, i can control everything with the knob and barely take my eyes off the road

blackeyeblitzar 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It’s also inaccessible for able people of young age. I’ve noticed many car companies don’t have a mindset for good design. So they make touch screen interfaces with very small targets. These are hard to hit when the car is in motion and require distraction. Core functions should be physical by law. Some companies with dial based controls like BMW’s iDrive got it right.

maeil 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Touchscreens are anti-accessibility.

They're anti-accesibility for one group and accessibility for another. I'm part of the latter group that struggles with tactile buttons for physical reasons. The former group may be bigger (no idea what the data looks like), but it's not black and white.

ethagnawl 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I'm only 40 but have had this issue for years -- especially with Apple products -- and I think it's compounded by my fingers being pretty callused. Regardless, I'm just unable to reliably use my family's iPad, sign my kids out of daycare, etc.

This is yet another example of accessibility being in everyone's interest.

WesolyKubeczek 9 days ago | root | parent |

If your iPad is plugged in, it’s extremely finicky with regard to the type of both the charger and the cable. Touch ID is extremely sensitive to electrical currents near it, it seems, and on home button/Touch ID it’s right near the charging socket. Oops. Unplug it, Touch ID works.

yazzku 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Even for non-impaired people, the lag on a touch screen is utterly miserable.

praptak 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Touchscreens are also extra bad in the car. The hands have mass and the motion of a car is shaky due to bumpy roads, curves, braking, etc.

This makes it hard to hit the desired area on a vertical touchscreen at near full extension of the arm.

contravariant 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Accessibility problems just mean systems are a pain to use. So much so that we describe easy to do things in terms of impairment. I could do it blindfolded, with one arm, two fingers in my nose, in my sleep etc.

The ultimate form of accessibility is not 'designed for impaired people' it is a system that does what you want without having to think about it or lift a finger.

bhauer 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Software lag isn't unique to touchscreens. Software lag is always a terrible thing, and developers who de-prioritize performance should be ashamed, but that is true regardless of what input is used.

jabroni_salad 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

It's kinda bearable with buttons because you get feedback. The ATM I use isn't the speediest thing but the buttons have a very tactile feel and it beeps at you for every press. It might not be "impressive", but it does cause forty dollars to appear and that's really all I wanted from it.

Now ask anyone with a touch screen in their car what their error rate on that thing is. Even the really good ones are pretty bad.

crote 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Physical buttons allow for memorized action sequences, though. As long as the input layer has some kind of FIFO buffer, it doesn't really matter how much lag the actual application has. If "call home" is always just "button A, 3x button B, button C" it is absolutely trivial to repeat that without even looking at the screen.

Touchscreens don't work quite as well for this. Even if it allows for input queuing, you often still need the previous screen to finish drawing to have a frame-of-reference for your presses. Even the slightest delay turns into an annoyance, and when it involves some kind of drag-scrolling a 50ms delay already becomes unbearable.

yazzku 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

A touch screen imposes additional lag, though. Detecting finger swipes for left/right, for example, requires more processing than spinning a fucking dial or pressing on a button. But, like you said, performance doesn't matter anymore to the companies that design these interfaces. We should have criminal laws for this type of thing along with the return to proper hardware interfaces. Lack of performance should be a criminal offense.

meindnoch 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Same thing happens if you play the guitar a lot and build up calluses on your fretting hand. Touchscreens stop registering certain parts of your fingertip where the skin is sufficiently thickened.

LoveMortuus 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I wonder what an experience of using a touchscreen with tactile feedback built in, I think it could be done with flexible display and then an array of haptic engines/vibro motors or something like that, perhaps even just magnetic array with plates.

All of this, so that the display could actually provide location specific tactile feedback (unlike just the whole device shaking).

ChumpGPT 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

This is so interesting; thanks for sharing. I often see my father-in-law tapping his phone a dozen times to get a response (85), and then I was teaching my mother how to use an iPad and noticed it was not that responsive to her taps. I sometimes need to tap twice to get anything to happen (50+), this helps me understand why.

jsheard 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

You should check if there's a system setting to adjust the touch sensitivity, it's usually billed as a way to compensate for screen protectors but it'll probably also help with dry fingers not being detected reliably.

jpc0 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Ironically fingerprint sensors just don't work for my dad, hes been an artisan all his life so even when he needs to actually give fingerprints ( police or whatever) they actually struggle to get prints off his hands.

Unrelated note, maybe Apple has this in mind when they implemented faceID...

dhosek 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

iOS is surprisingly accessibly for the blind and visually impaired. Apple has shown that it can be done and between app review and accessibility support in the frameworks, despite the lack of buttons, the iPhone has long been the preferred phone for the visually impaired.

Never heard this about touchscreens not registering your touch when you get old. I guess my 83-year-old mother¹ and 92-year-old father aren’t old enough to experience this yet.

⸻

1. On the other hand, because her fingerprints have essentially vanished, my mother was never able to get touch ID to work.

RobMurray 9 days ago | root | parent |

iOS is accessible to blind people because of Voiceover, not because it has a touch screen. There really isn't a great alternative if you want access to all the mainstream apps. I used to have a Sony android phone with a tiny physical keyboard, and I still miss the keyboard even though Talkback on android in those days (Android 4) was unbelievably bad.

Before that, I could text quicker on a t9 keypad than I can with the qwerty keyboard on a touch screen.

The feedback from tactile keys also means you don't have to constantly listen exclusively to the phone while operating it. I find it impossible to use Voiceover in a noisy environment or when someone is talking to me.

rralian 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Interesting. I’ve noticed this happening for me but I thought it was because my fingertips are calloused from playing guitar. But I’m also in my late forties. So it’s probably a double whammy for me.

miki123211 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

It's not touchscreens that are anti-accessibility, it's touch controls. That's a very important distinction.

I can use a proper touchscreen phone just fine, as its OS is advanced enough to run a screen reader, and its touch screen can precisely locate where it was touched and supports flicks, swipes and multi-finger gestures.

Proper touch screens have some very important advantages, notably being able to show different controls at different times. You want to have a different button layout when you're typing a text than when you're watching a movie or playing a game. Physical buttons make this impossible.

Even blind people benefit from this, modern phones have a mode where you can use a touch screen to input characters in Braille, treating different parts of the screen as keys on a brailler (think piano with 6 keys). Each combination of these keys, pressed or touched at once, inputs a specific character[1].

Now touch controls, like those you can find on a washing machine / coffee maker, make no sense. There's no screen behind them, so they're not dynamic in any way, and the primitive software of such devices (as well as the need to seell them in multiple countries without providing specific support for any particular human language) make accessibility impossible to achieve.

lozf 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> Physical buttons make this impossible.

For many years now we've had various interfaces that use physical buttons whose function can change at different times during operation, the current function being indicated by the screen: Old fashioned ATMs with 4 buttons on each side of the screen, many business-class feature-phones had "soft-keys", even old DOS programs that used Function Keys are conceptually similar.

There are differing degrees of compromise vs utility.

valval 9 days ago | root | parent |

You can’t change the place of the buttons in any of your examples.

lozf 9 days ago | root | parent |

Correct - that's a feature. You can learn the pattern of key presses through a series of individual functions to execute more elaborate tasks quite quickly.

aftbit 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I like the strategy used by multi-function displays in plane cockpits. They have physical buttons along the side that can trigger different actions, labelled by text and icons on the screen alongside the button. This allows you to find and press the button even if there is turbulence or engine vibrations making it hard to use a touchscreen.

kragen 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Touchpads, you mean? Touchpads are waterproof and washable, like membrane keyboards, which is a real plus in the kitchen. Also they're cheap as fuck.

eternityforest 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

What about touch buttons recessed by a few millimeters to prevent accidents, with braille on the face plate?

Touch controls have one really big advantage, they have no switch to wear out, and no opening to get water damaged. Touch might be a worse UX, at least to highly tactile people who are aware of their fingers often, but it can last decades with the cheapest imaginable hardware.

Dwedit 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

wlesieutre 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

http://web.archive.org/web/20210509153031/https://www.reddit...

_kb 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Same experience with an induction cooktop with touch controls. At least once a week this is what that looks like:

1. Place pot of water on element to boil

2. Enable boost mode

3. Water reaches boil as I'm distracted with other prep / child / HN post, and overflows

4. All controls (including ability to disable boost, reduce heat, or turn off element) rendered completely inoperable due to liquid on glass surface impacting pcap sensing

5. Dry, repeat.

exchemist 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

To my enormous relief, the Samsung stove that came with our house gets this right - even covered in water the controls still work. I was previously dead-against induction just because I couldn't find a good quality stove-top with physical buttons, to the point where I'd already budgeted replacing it with gas when we bought the house. I don't know how they've done it, but it's the only one I've ever used that manages. (For comparison, the high-end Miele and cheap-and-cheerful non-branded ones I've used in various rental houses over the last 20 years have all had exactly the problem you describe above).

pcl 9 days ago | root | parent |

A few of the new home models (in Europe at least) come with physical knobs.

My two gripes about induction are the touch controls they typically ship with and the inability to roast peppers over an open flame. But the incredible temperature response makes up for both IMO.

dustincoates 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I moved into a new apartment with an induction cooktop and radiators with the same type of "buttonless button" controls and those continually give me problems. You can't just touch them, but you have to slide your finger over the controls in just the right way, and hope that (for the radiator) you've hit the 1 in 3 chance of it actually working.

My next cooktop will probably still be induction, but it will definitely have knobs.

wildrhythms 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

My Whirlpool stove does the opposite thing: after I've finished cooking and it's cooling down, it will activate the Warm oven setting on its own. I find that the Warm touch button is especially sensitive on its own, so there must be some small flexing happening somewhere and activating it.

Solution: Immediately after cooking I walk over to the junction box and turn off the breaker to the stovetop.

raydev 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Our new house came with a new Samsung dishwasher that had touch controls along the top lip of the door, and the door popped open at the end of every wash to let steam out. Imagine heated clouds of water passing over the panel every time. The panel started acting strangely/inconsistently within 3 years, and then by year 4 it was dead.

ted_bunny 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Some of these flaws are crazy. Do companies release products without actually trying them out?

MisterKent 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

It's very simple: what sells on the showroom floor and what works at home aren't necessarily the same thing.

trgn 9 days ago | root | parent |

not sure about that. How many people have bought an oven _because_ it had a touchscreen?

rurp 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

Probably not many explicitly, but I bet it contributes to a lot of shoppers thinking the appliance is "sleek" or "modern". Touch screens have been a big design fad in recent years and design fads sell products.

I'm hopeful that the tide is turning on these designs as more people have to use them day to day and realize that touchscreens are categorically worse than tactile controls in a number of scenarios.

WhyNotHugo 4 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Often times there’s simply no alternative. When we purchased our current stovetop we didn’t find any with non-touch controls.

trgn 9 hours ago | root | parent |

i used to have one of those too. the only thing i liked about that that they were easy to clean.

rqtwteye 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Reminds me of some rental cars I had over the years (Buck being my favorite). I couldn't imagine anybody actually trying to drive the car before releasing. They were so bad.

f1shy 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Oh yes… never buy a Miele oven with touch buttons

vdvsvwvwvwvwv 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Same with Bosch.

Two problems:

Buttons stopped working after warranty expired so had to pay for a service call to have it fixed. Luckily no parts were needed. I don't recall the reason right now.

It has a spinny disc, so like a potentiometer but not. It is a flat removable ring and behind it it uses a touch button of sorts

You have to pull it off amd clean it before every use for it to work and when it does work it is very fiddly to use.

offices 9 days ago | root | parent |

That pseudo-potentiometer is sick

account42 9 days ago | root | parent |

And ridiculously expensive to replace for what is a glorified magnet if you happen to accidentally burn the plastic a little bit which is enough for it to becoe unusable.

vvpan 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Same for Smeg.

lukeh 9 days ago | root | parent |

We have a Smeg oven, not with touchscreen controls, but with two pushable knobs that are easily pressed (thus starting the oven) by brushing past them. This oven has the worst user experience of anything, hardware or software, I've even used.

vvpan 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

I used one at a relative's house and I agree - worst appliance user experience that I've come across.

71bw 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

In what conditions do you live that brushing past an oven is an often reoccuring situation?

WarOnPrivacy 8 days ago | root | parent |

> In what conditions do you live that brushing past an oven is an often reoccurring situation?

I live with my 5 adult sons in a house with a small kitchen. Every hip-level surface gets smacked regularly.

ninalanyon 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

My oven doesn't have a touchscreen but it does have touch controls and it works perfectly, it's never disturbed by the steam from the oven even when it quite visibly condenses on the surface.

My point is that it isn't always a design failure to use touch controls, sometimes it is an implementation failure that makes them unusable.

account42 9 days ago | root | parent |

It's still a design failure, just not for that particular reason.

ninalanyon 7 days ago | root | parent |

What makes it a design failure? It seems good to me. The surface is completely flat glass and easily cleaned, there is no possibility for dirt to get into the switches or accumulate in crevices.

qwertox 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Wow, this is definitely the worst example. At least it's not in a security sensitive context.

wlesieutre 9 days ago | root | parent |

Makes you wonder if anyone at the company ever even tested it with food in the oven

arp242 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Usually what happens is that it's tested under ideal "lab conditions", so this never happens. In real life ovens get a bit grimy and produce more smoke. Stuff like that. Still shoddy engineering of course.

It's the same with designers doing their light-grey text on a white background with their 8K colour-perfect screen in optimal lighting conditions, and then when you point out this is difficult to read they go "I don't see the problem!"

lowboy 9 days ago | root | parent |

Do you have a recent example of a professional designer doing “light-grey text on a white background”?

Because the designers I’ve worked with would never ship that. But maybe I’ve just worked with competent designers.

guappa 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I work with such designers.

They also love to disable the mouse scroll and the scrollbars, so the page has 300 more settings but you have no way of knowing that (this also happened to me on windows 11 btw).

It reached the point where I implemented my own script to bypass the GUI at work.

arp242 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Recent examples I encountered include (not necessarily the best examples, just that I recall off-hand):

- Neo4j docs: https://neo4j.com/docs/cypher-manual/current/introduction/cy...

- RabbitMQ docs (esp. that sidebar): https://www.rabbitmq.com/docs/reliability

- Argo Workflows UI (no link, as you need to login).

- CV from "senior UX engineer" I received yesterday in response to a job ad I posted.

- Just now I found https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ when searching for something else – the quote at the top is nigh-unreadable due to the "font-weight: 250" which has the same kind of effect as low-contrast grey text.

- I've also had some discussions with designers over the years. Some view their work as "art" and get incredibly defensive about even minor changes done for real pragmatic reasons. Of course, there are also plenty other more pragmatic and competent designers out there.

- HN does it for downvoted/dead comments and "text posts" such as ask/show HN. Dang said it's a feature. Many disagree.

It's not as prevalent as it once was – it was even worse 10 years ago – but it's still encountered fairly regularly.

lowboy 9 days ago | root | parent |

Semantics, but the #5e636a (39% lightness) text of Neo4j and #1c1e21 (12% lightness) of RabbitMQ aren't what I would consider _light_ grey. That would be up in the #bbb-eee range, or 75%+ lightness (black 0%, dark grey 25%, grey 50%, light grey 75%, white 100%). And I would be surprised if designers were involved in those 2 documentation sites.

Font weight is a crucial factor of readability, and it depends on screen specifics. On my 2020 M1 mbp at ~40% screen brightness, the NNGroup link quote is quite readable. As it is on my phone.

I don't rate any designer or developer very highly if they're too precious about their "art".

The HN dead/downvoted comments is contentious for sure. I don't agree with the choice fwiw.

guappa 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Ah you are one of those people who believe nobody in the whole world has worse eyesight or screen or lighting conditions than what you presently have.

lowboy 9 days ago | root | parent |

Nope. And not sure how you made the leap there from me giving context into my environment and equipment and how I was perceiving some text on the screen.

arp242 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I perceive it as "light grey", so shrug.

It's all "readable" in the sense of "I can read it", but not in the sense of "I can read it effortlessly". I have a bit of CSS in Stylus to fix it, and it takes noticeably less effort to read it with a "normal" font. The RabbitMQ menu is just so much easier to scan as well with a more normal colour.

lowboy 9 days ago | root | parent |

Good distinction between light grey setting and perception (I was speaking to the former). Maybe on your screen/OS/browser for a given font, a setting of #000 would start at (perceived) “grey”.

And agreed that readability is a scale and it’s best to be on the “easy” end of that scale.

MaxikCZ 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I dont mind the fact that they havent tested it with food, but I cant understand how they never recalled every single unit after noticing it for the first time.

Its like they see it, and be like "Ah, everyone who bought it got screwed over, and it will hurt our brand, but its still cheaper to quietly ignore it". Despisable

schmidtleonard 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

K0balt 9 days ago | root | parent |

Don’t forget the Uber-minimalist aesthetic, where there are no markings or textures to designate the touch regions, but instead you just touch or swipe different parts of the object for different functionality. That’s my favourite, especially after you haven’t used something for a few months.

Bonus points if a firmware update changes the invisible control layout.

glenneroo 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Samsung used to do this for some of their cheaper monitors. I remember I bought a couple of them for one of my early dual-screen setups (15+ years ago) and every day I would slowly and gently run my finger along the entire length of the monitor until it would power on. It had to be slow otherwise there was a chance I would power it off again going back the other direction. Even more fun because after turning it on, I would slide past some other button, unintentionally opening some menu and changing some random settings (most commonly changing the input from DVI to something else). If I was lucky, I would power it off after changing something and wonder why it wasn't powering on again (note: it was powered on, but set to the wrong input). How that monitor got past Q&A I will never understand. IIRC the buttons had tiny, nearly invisible (light grey on black) icon labels... I used to keep a flashlight on my table so I could figure out which invisible button to press to get things working again.

xnorswap 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The Sony WH-1000XM4 approach.

Taking them off pauses your stuff. Sometimes that's useful, but on a desktop that's most often just annoying, particularly if you're just itching or adjusting them.

More mysterious is that tapping them also pauses, but not always, and not reliably enough to actually use to pause and unpause.

Even more mysterious though is the "two finger" tap which changes your headphones mode entirely, so that any background noise stops the noise cancellation. (It calls this "Conversation mode" or something).

But any background noise seems to cancel the noise cancellation, so it's less useful than just turning that off.

But this feature is easy to accidentally turn on, and it took a lot of googling in frustration to work out how to get it back to the normal operation.

God knows what other hidden features these things have, because who bothers to read the manual for a pair of headphones?

Sohcahtoa82 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

I had to install Sony's app for my headphones to disable automatically turning off noise canceling whenever it detected speech.

I'd be playing a game and say "Dammit" in response to something and my headphones would be like "OH! You're trying to have a conversation! Let me help you with that!"

Or I'd be on an airplane watching something funny, I'd laugh, and it'd disable the noise canceling.

This kind of automation is a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.

xnorswap 7 days ago | root | parent |

Indeed, that's exactly the problem I had with that mode.

The fact you can get into that mode accidentally with no obvious way to cancel it is a UX failure.

jabbequbs 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Thank you! I have a pair of these and they recently started beeping occasionally and switching noise canceling mode on their own. I was not looking forward to digging through search results on this.

guappa 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

At work we have a dishwasher that has a single LED pointing downwards. So the only indication that it is running is a faint red glow on the floor.

This results in it getting opened while running all the time, and spraying water everywhere.

But at least the front panel is not made ugly by things like buttons and a LED!

jannes 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

This type of dishwasher is made to be integrated in a kitchen with other cabinets (i.e. covered with the same door material as your other cabinets).

So the entire front of the dishwasher is customizable and can't have any buttons/indicators.

account42 9 days ago | root | parent |

There are plenty of kitchen appliances that have a front panel but still let you customize the rest of the front face to match the cabinets.

Ekaros 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Probably shares same design as "integrated" that is door covered version. Which certainly does look cleaner interior design, but trade offs any reasonable visibility of progress. Style over substance. I would also love to see time counter on front, instead not seeing dishwasher...

guappa 9 days ago | root | parent |

In my first times in that office I had to open all of the closets to find the dishwasher.

jawilson2 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Bosch?

We are semi-unhappy with ours. Our kids will open it to quickly grab a cup or bowl if nothing else is available, and forget to press the "Start" button to restart it. Our old washer would auto-restart after being opened. Oh, and the Start button needs to be pressed for more than a second, and there isn't really a tactile click when it succeeds. Which it doesn't always do. And if you press it twice it can reset and have to re-run the entire cycle.

schmidtleonard 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Hell yeah! Let's change the active region to the upper left corner of the hamburger symbol and make sure that the hieroglyph itself doesn't reflect this in any way.

Dear Satan, I believe now would be a good time to discuss the subject of a raise!

rkuska 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

lolinder 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

A touch interface on the stove seems like the canonical example of a straightforwardly bad idea. Sure, let's use a capacitive touch interface to control the most dangerous appliance in the kitchen, one which also happens to frequently be the most humid spot and also the most likely to feature splashed oil! What could possibly go wrong?

redwall_hp 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

My favorite design issue with those: capacitive burner controls on the cooking surface mean you can spill something on them and be unable to turn the heat off to clean the thing keeping you from turning the heat off.

kubik369 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Have you encountered any that work like this? In my small sample (n~5, Europe), all capacitive cooktops turn off whenever you spill something on the controls.

account42 9 days ago | root | parent |

Which, while better than buning your house down, is still needlessly annoying.

What I really want is for the controls to not be on the cooking surface at all but that only seems to be available for stovetop + oven combinations which have their own annoying limitations.

occz 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Induction ranges stop heating when you remove the cookware from them however, making this somewhat less of a concern.

Still bad design on many levels, but not quite what I would call a safety hazard for this reason alone.

scotty79 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I actually love that I can easily wipe everything when it's dirty. I'd hate cleaning knobs and most of the tactile buttons.

Some touch controls are incredibly good at filtering false inputs. Unfortunately you can't tell which.

rrix2 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> I actually love that I can easily wipe everything when it's dirty. I'd hate cleaning knobs and most of the tactile buttons.

the knobs on my manually operated range pull right off their posts and go soak in the sink with some soap and hot water once a week while i spray the range's control surface with whatever spray cleaner and wipe it off with every other flat surface in my kitchen.

after ten or fifteen minutes of soaking, anything left on the knobs fall off with a dry rag that goes in the cloth washer afterwards.

ninkendo 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I’m in full agreement with everyone here who hates touch screens, and I also spent a long time looking for induction ranges with physical knobs (IIRC there was only one model in the universe with them), and was so mad that I had to get one with touch buttons…

But I gotta say, the ability to just simply wipe the whole stove surface with a towel and be done has more than made up for the touch buttons sucking.

With physical knobs: Take knobs off and soak them, use a towel and wipe a circle around the nub that’s left, try not to leave a circular streak pattern, put knobs back. Or just wipe the knobs with the towel and get close enough on the surface.

Touch buttons: wipe the whole thing in big strokes, you’re done.

I clean the whole surface after every use now, because it’s just so damned easy.

masfuerte 9 days ago | root | parent |

You can have both. My mother's induction cooker has a flat top and knobs on the front. It's easy to clean and easy to operate.

ninkendo 9 days ago | root | parent |

I think that was the one model in the universe I was referring to. I don’t have the layout in my kitchen to put knobs in the front, my stovetop has to fit in a pretty well-defined area. Knobs in the front would have been totally ideal.

lolinder 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Yep, every knob I've ever had on a stove works this way and makes them trivial to clean. In the meantime, during regular use they're guaranteed to never stop functioning because they got wet or oily.

Dwedit 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

You can easily wipe a membrane keypad clean. Those require force to trigger the buttons, so they are not at all like touch buttons.

Ekaros 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Oh, and on exactly over what surface we usually lift or holds lids that most certainly have at least some condensation... You know when taking a peek or stirring it for a few seconds...

account42 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

OTOH, a flat surface is easier to clean.

Ideal would be to put the control surface further away from the cooking surface but that won't integrate into semi-standardized kitchen designs.

lolinder 9 days ago | root | parent |

Moving the controls solves the problem of splatter but doesn't solve the problem of dirty or wet fingers that can't accurately control a touch screen.

KineticLensman 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Totally agree. The controllability of my Nef induction hobs was excellent, but the controls were horrendous. E.g. going from a level 9 rapid heat-up to a level 2 simmer is seven distinct touches. Each with an annoying beep. Related to this is the lack of a single-tap hob-off for an individual hob.

For medical reasons [1] I had to transition from the induction hob to a ceramic hob, and had to choose the Nef equivalent because it had the same physical footprint. So now I have the same crap controls with much worse response time to the control inputs themselves. The ceramic hob also can't detect when a pan has been removed so will leave a hob dangerously hot but not glowing. I've got used to it now but it is very frustrating and still catches me out sometimes.

[1] I have an implanted defibrillator whose sensor is nulled out by an inductions hob's magnetic fields.

James_K 9 days ago | root | parent |

A lot of people don't realise that you can push both the up and down button at the same time to set a hob ring to zero intensity. So level 9 to level 2 is actually just three presses.

tpxl 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Maybe yes, maybe no. Parents stove does that, mine does not. Getting a burner to 1 out of 9 takes a stupid amount of time (~15 seconds).

Freak_NL 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I raised this topic yesterday in another thread¹ as well. I'm currently eyeing stoves like this:

https://media.s-bol.com/qn6AyQBAxA33/lYREMLg/1198x1200.jpg

(https://etna.nl/keukenapparatuur/fi590zwa/)

As I'll be remodelling the kitchen in any case, going to a stand-alone appliance is fine by me.

There are several models with knobs out there now. It seems to have been picked up as a premium feature.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42025123#42025336

twobitshifter 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

https://www.impulselabs.com/

This is a cool one with knobs that can be removed. Never used one, but I liked the idea.

computator 9 days ago | root | parent |

Love it. Removable magnetic buttons with flat flush surface underneath that’s just as easy to clean as a touch surface. The only downside is the possibility of losing the knobs.

account42 9 days ago | root | parent |

Downside for you, profitable upside for the device manufacturer who can sell replacement knobs to locked in customers at ridiculous margins.

r_klancer 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I had this criterion too.

Fortunately by last year the this Café (GE) double oven induction range was available here in the US: https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... I have a few quibbles (mainly, that only one of the burners is properly sized for a 12" skillet) but overall I like it.

I don't mind the touch buttons for operating the oven and timers--in fact, they're nice and easy to clean (with a handy "lock screen" feature so you can spray and wipe down the front panel without everything going nuts) but I'm pretty sure trying to fine tune the burner settings using a touch slider while keeping an eye on multiple pans would have driven me nuts. I also have haven't had problems with the knobs getting dirty or being hard to wipe down if they do, to address a point raised in another reply.

Price splits the difference between the entry level ranges and the snobby brands (Miele, Thermador, etc).

nullwarp 9 days ago | root | parent |

Bought this same oven and share the same quibbles but otherwise it's been great.

The criteria of knobs on an induction oven filters out quite a lot of options annoyingly.

scotty79 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I'm currently using Miele with touch controls but it's really good at filtering out false inputs. I have no problem whatsoever even with my messy cooking.

Too bad you have no way of telling how good controls are in a product before you start using them.

coldpie 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I spent like $5k on a Wolf gas range because it was the cheapest one on the market that simply had five knobs for the controls and absolutely nothing else. No computer, no screen, no shitty fake buttons, not even a clock. Worth it.

walthamstow 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I think you'd have to get a plug-in one, which depending on your local voltage might not be ideal. The commercial ones made by Buffalo have one big knob but are pricey. Tefal make a £100 domestic one with actual buttons.

marcosdumay 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Of all things, it's a novel kind of stove with the distinctive feature that you can place a piece of plastic just next to the food and it will work fine... Why no designer wants to exploit that feature?

v1ne 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Yeah, that's also how my long journey with induction cooktops started. My main grief with the induction cooktops was the ergonomics: Most touch surfaces on those cooktops require at least 2 touches: select the flame, then adjust the power. I don't know, that completely breaks the interaction for me. I want something to directly adjust the heat on every single one of the flames, especially when something starts to boil over or fries too fast. In addition, touch often wouldn't register on those, so I have to press longer or harder, both of which is even more inconvenient. No, even more: it outright sucks.

Well, and after years of searching, friends recommended me the AEG models, like IKE64450XB (here in Europe). And honestly, I was happy with the touch surface ever after: It reacts quickly enough and I can modify every flame at an instant. I don't even get a penny for this, I'm just satisfied. So, yeah, touch can be good, like on a smartphone, even on household devices.

On the other side, it's really hit or miss with these touch UIs: I also have an combined washing machine + dryer from the same brand and there I need to press each touch surface for at least half a second, and not touch the metal case of the machine, otherwise the touch wouldn't register. Then, the UI would sometimes hang, but still register touches, playing them back once it has caught up.

corytheboyd 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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…

lrasinen 9 days ago | root | parent |

Or cats. Waking up in the middle of the night because the stove is beeping is not my favorite thing.

fwip 9 days ago | root | parent |

Not as dangerous as a stove, but the Xbox One had a capacitive on-off button. Turns out the dog could turn it off just by his fur touching it when walking by it.

marssaxman 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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!

account42 9 days ago | root | parent |

My clothes dryrer has buttons like that. And of course it will ignore button presses if it's not in the correct iternal state yet after you start it up or change modes (which at least is done via a real rotary knob). And you can't just tap the buttons (would be unsafe) but have to hold for 1/2 second. The clothes washer is thankfully still and older model with real buttons.

pornel 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

71bw 9 days ago | root | parent |

Yet another "innovation" stemming from electric "cars". Truly an abhorrent abomination on top of true cars...

pornel 9 days ago | root | parent |

They put the exact same faux buttons in their ICE cars.

This is not an EV thing. It's a contemporary trend, and it just happens that most newly designed cars are EVs now.

The rise of touchscreen technology was just coincidental with the rise of EVs. The first Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf, and Renault Zoe had crappy little screens, and real buttons for everything, like most cars of their era.

OTOH today EV-hating Toyota keeps making screens bigger. The latest Lamborghini has multiple touchscreens too.

This change would have happened even if EVs didn't exist. iPad is more to blame for that trend than an electric drivetrain.

tallanvor 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

matsemann 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

Moru 9 days ago | root | parent |

A friends appartment building had had a keypad lock installed a few years ago. Nice physical buttons. I swear the lock opened before I pressed the last number of the code, that fast. Sadly they changed it to an even newer lock system a couple of months ago. Now it's still physical buttons but the unlocking takes a couple of seconds and is totaly quiet. So you try to open the door and nothing happens. And then you try again and then it works. The friend often gets calls from visitors asking what the code was again because they can't get in. UX seems to be hard even without mixing in touch-controls.

m463 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The worst is the dishwasher buttons/lights on the edge of the door so you can't look at them without opening it. What is this stupid trend?

pants2 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

My dishwasher has buttons on the top like this, and during the heat dry cycle the steam will activate the buttons and I'll hear lots of random beeps from the kitchen. Ponce in a while it manages to cancel or restart itself, hilariously bad design.

Dwedit 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

While my dishwasher has the "buttons" at the top of the door, it puts the light on the bottom, so it shines on the floor. Little red dot. Cats like that dot.

ziml77 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

My parents have one like this. My dad got it because it blends in with the cabinets. Purely an aesthetic choice. It absolutely sucks to use though because once the cycle is done it beeps extremely loudly until you open the door since it can't just indicate with a light that there are clean dishes ready inside.

sedatk 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

drivers99 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

s0rce 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

My induction cooktop has the worst touch buttons that constant beep and sense pots, tongs or other stuff as well. Very annoying.

jhickok 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

See the Dell XPS https://imgur.com/KbOXGYa

sedatk 9 days ago | root | parent |

That's the only reason I didn't buy this otherwise a great laptop. I guess they're "testing the market" for new gimmicks.

jhickok 9 days ago | root | parent |

It's pretty much the perfect linux laptop for me, but I will never willingly a laptop with a function row like that. A non-tactile ESC key is especially head-scratching.

jannes 9 days ago | root | parent |

Just an idea: remap your Caps Lock key to Esc. I already do that with all my devices anyway.

tivert 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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.

My dishwasher has button to activate a control lock to prevent that. But the touch buttons suck so much and it requires a long press to activate that it always takes me two or three attempts and at least 10-15 seconds to push that button.

15 seconds for a button push, WTF were the designers thinking?

ioseph 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

This is a big barrier for me replacing our gas stove with induction. I get why they use them (easy cleaning, flush profile) but I just find a knob 100x more pleasant to use.

jamil7 9 days ago | root | parent |

I can't stand induction stove tops, partially for this reason and opted to put a gas stovetop in our kitchen with an electric oven. I cook a lot and trying to quickly adjust the heat when you have something on your hands makes them completely useless and infuriating. There's the whole sensory feedback side of gas too which I'm so used to but that's a separate topic.

6yyyyyy 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

These capacitive buttons are actually super cheap, a lot of microcontrollers have this function built-in so the buttons are effectively free, just an extra pad on the PCB.

peeters 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

My kettle decided to use capacitive resistance buttons (even though they're elevated so they could just be switches). Every time I splash water on them (which you know, can happen sometimes with kettles) I have to dry them off and power cycle the kettle to get them to work again.

Innovators gonna innovate I guess.

thih9 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

In some cases touch buttons are preferable. At least they are always in a predictable spot and often perform the same function.

Compare that to an actual screen where the button label and button position can change.

andrew-dc 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I hate these and hope they are heading out also. Our hands and fingers are built to receive touch feedback, and these specific kind of buttons negate all of that.

adolph 8 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> 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.

Douglas Adams in 1979 knew the coming future:

A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329

m12k 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

phreack 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

watwut 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

They are the trend setter. But yes, their new IDE looks good aesthetically but completely sux for use and discoverability.

Wyverald 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I love the new UI. Reduces a lot of visual clutter and lets me focus on the code. I don't understand the problem with telling where a tab ends and the next begins; I don't click on the borders of tabs anyway, just the text. (And there's an icon in front of the tab name.)

cesarb 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> They also got rid of most labels, so it became a game of guessing what each symbol could possibly mean (another provably awful trend).

You also have to guess that the symbol is even there in the first place; in that new UI, many symbols are invisible until you hover over them.

dmix 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

hn_throwaway_99 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

That "flat everything" design trend of 10-15 years ago was sooooo annoying. And it was so apparent that extremely little thought about the usability of it was considered once the trend gained momentum.

I remember when Android (don't recall exactly which release) replaced their standard back, home and menu buttons with just a triangle, square and circle. It was so bizarre. I felt like a toddler playing with a "fit the blocks into the different shaped holes" toy.

amatecha 9 days ago | root | parent |

"Was"? flat UI is still here and it's horrible. It drives me crazy having to guess that a featureless piece of text might be a button because its position in a window vaguely suggests it may be a button and not just a random piece of floating text. So much subtle information is just gone from modern UIs.

Moru 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

As a small developer, if you don't follow the big ones, watch your reviews plumet with comments like "Ugly UI!", "Old design!".

brikym 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

AlexAndScripts 9 days ago | root | parent |

I got an email from Microsoft recently with that funny thin font used for headers. It reminded me that that was a trend around 2016 or so. The headers would have thinner font strokes than the body text, despite being substantially larger.

I remember that around that time (I was quite young) I was putting it in all my attempts at websites (all hideous, even at the time) and I thought it looked really cool. Funny the way trends go.

In the case of the email it was clear that it just hadn't been updated with the times.

TheKarateKid 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

karmonhardan 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

grishka 9 days ago | root | parent |

Material came out in mid 2014. I know that for sure because I was at the Google I/O where they presented it together with Android L/5. iOS 7 was released in 2013.

josefrichter 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

seanmcdirmid 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

hn_throwaway_99 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Cost is a big thing, but also configurability. While you can assign different functionality to different buttons, it's easier to add features after the fact to a touch screen. While this can be both a blessing and a curse, I own a new model vehicle from a startup car company, and the interface has improved significantly in the past 2 years with OTA updates.

Shawnj2 9 days ago | root | parent |

Sure but there’s a handful of things people actually want physical controls for (shockingly all of the exact same things cars from 20 years ago have physical controls for) and I think having Eg AC controls and basic music controls with hard buttons and the rest with a screen is the logical result here.

kemiller 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

There is truth to that, but it’s also true that cars simply have way more functionality than they did 20 years ago and it’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing.

deergomoo 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm not sure I buy this. My 2020 Civic has physical knobs and buttons for most† of the climate functions, media/radio controls, answer/hangup a call, lights, wipers, cruise control (including speed limiter and follow distance), driver's display, brake hold, eco mode, stop/start on/off, dampers, gears (though it's a manual so goes without saying), windows, mirror folding, and then a few down by my knee that I never need to touch like collision detection, traction control etc. I've edited this post four times already because I keep remembering more buttons it has.

With the regrettable exception of the couple of climate controls I detail below, the only functionality on the touch screen is stuff I shouldn't be fiddling with while in motion anyway: GPS, car settings, and anything that CarPlay displays. I know a Civic isn't a prime example of a "high tech" car, but it's a well-specced one and I'm struggling to think of much that substantially fancier cars have that would blow past a reasonable limit for physical controls.

† on/off, temp, screen blower, seat heaters, and defrosters all have physical controls. The manual fan speed and direction controls are on the touch screen. I wish they weren't, and I believe the newer 11th gen has restored these as physical knobs and buttons.

CoryAlexMartin 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I was at a Honda dealership in late 2021 looking for a car, and I mentioned to the car salesmen how I don't like how touchscreen-dependent cars have become. Then ten minutes later he's showing me the touchscreen climate controls in a 10th gen Civic and talking about how cool they are.

I wound up getting a new 11th gen Civic since used cars were ridiculously expensive at the time, and I was very pleased to find that the touchscreen is only used for iOS/Android and some settings. The climate control knobs are imperfect though: for some reason they decided that the user should select which vents are active with an infinitely scrolling knob, so you can't utilize muscle memory, and you have to look at it while you're turning it. An improvement over the previous generation, but a step down from my dad's 1992 Civic.

wincy 9 days ago | root | parent |

Toyota has also swung back into the button direction. Only the CarPlay and a few of the backup camera controls use the touch interface (and the button I use most for the camera is a physical button). I’m sitting in my car right now waiting, and so just counted all the buttons I can reach while driving from the drivers seat and got to 95 including things like left toggle right toggle for the mirrors adjustment being two buttons, so being as liberal as possible in my definitions of a button or knob. There’s then a touch screen a little bigger than an iPad in the center console that has the Toyota infotainment stuff (which I disabled and opted out of the master data agreement so it does nothing) and CarPlay.

The thing is I intuitively know about 50 of them since I’ve been driving the vehicle about six months now.

71bw 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

2020 Audi A4 here: all AC controls, lights, wipers, cruise control, volume, speedometer display options etc. are phyiscal. Thank God. Of course being Audi it's a bit goofy at parts, but manageable. I cannot imagine having to touch a screen to skip a track or, God forbid, change the gear into reverse.

Of course it still has a touch screen display for all the usual carplay/android auto shenanigans.

banannaise 8 days ago | root | parent |

Slightly older Audis (up through 2017-2019 depending on model) had a clickable wheel interface instead of a touchscreen. It's vastly superior, and I deliberately bought a used 2017 A4 to get it.

71bw 5 days ago | root | parent |

Yes, nothing will ever beat the old MMI when it comes to ease of use (especially once you got a hang of it and could do stuff "blind" without looking at the screen). Just wanted to say that this one still has more than enough in physical form; I also drive a 2022 A3 every now and again and I'd curse, for life, the person who figured out CAPACITIVE skip/volume/power on buttons are a good idea if I could.

bluefirebrand 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Do cars really have that much more functionality that it requires everything to be thrown into a touch screen?

I have a 2017 Chevy Sonic with a built in touchscreen and I basically never have to touch it other than to input an address into Android auto.

I haven't found any pieces of the car functionality I cannot access through a button somewhere on the dash or steering wheel

I doubt a 2024 car has that much more functionality than my 2017

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

Both of my cars from different makers have a ton of things which don't have a physical button. Configuring the colors of the lights in the interior, setting restrictions on secondary keys, changing the doorpad settings, configuring navigation quick saves, configuring auto lock on walk away, whether the car moves the seats back for easier getting in and out, how much it moves the seats for that, toggling liftgate gestures, setting the default settings for ADAS systems, configuring if the mirrors automatically tuck in or not, configuring the puddle lights, configuring charging settings, configuring stereo equalizer and other deeper settings, rear occupant alert systems, configuring how long it waits to have the lights on, defaults for auto-high beam and its sensitivity, configuring remote start options, deeper setting options for drive modes, configuring cross traffic alerting, deeper route planning, etc. Probably still a hundred more options I haven't listed here.

bluefirebrand 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Do people actually use most of this stuff or is it just cruft? My guess is it is junk that almost no one ever looks at nevermind actually uses or changes with any frequency

I'm talking about important, everyday functions of a vehicle, like the radio, GPS, heating, cruise control, etc

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

I agree, controls drivers should be expected to use when the car is in motion should be physical and on/immediately around the steering wheel.

GPS? As in you're going to have like a whole QWERTY keyboard as physical keys or something for punching in addresses? I've got no problem with practically everything about the navigation be on a touchscreen, I shouldn't be messing with it while the car is moving. Just make it big.

Radio/stereo should have physical controls on the steering wheel. You shouldn't really be messing with the center console while driving. It's not like you should be swapping CD's or navigating folders on the USB drive or whatever. Anything past next/previous and volume is probably too much.

Cruise control should be on the steering wheel or stalks as well.

It's 2024. Thermostats have been a thing for a long time. Cars can make us comfortable without having to mess with the settings every five minutes. Every time I'm in a car that doesn't have auto climate I hate it, have to constantly futz with it to make it actually comfortable. Meanwhile even my 2000 Accord had a decent auto climate that I practically never had to touch. But whatever, put the basic AC controls and what not as physical controls. The only one I care to absolutely be physical is max defrost.

But my point is, there are a ton of controls you're possibly going to use sometimes, even if only to originally set up the car how you want it. It's asinine thinking every function of a modern car can have some physical switch and toggle to it. Loads of cars would look like the controls on the Space Shuttle if you forced every feature available to be assigned to a physical switch.

kreyenborgi 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

But that's stuff you don't need to touch while driving.

We only need knobs for crucial things like fog lights, turn signals and skipping podcast ads.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

The standard I was replying to was:

> I haven't found any pieces of the car functionality

Any functionality.

I agree though. Any critical driving function should be physical. Like the podcast ad skip button on the steering wheel, one of the most important control components in a modern car.

Crespyl 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Surely none of that requires a touchscreen though? Just basic generic navigation and selection buttons will work fine.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

It doesn't require it to be a touchscreen, sure, but it practically requires it to be a screen. But I'd much rather just quickly tap a checkbox instead of press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press navigating the giant array of settings.

And then on top of that people want AA/CarPlay which is designed around touch inputs first, so you're going to have that screen be touch anyways.

None of that should really be changed by the driver when the car is in motion, and you'd have to manage the deep navigation of a bunch of button presses on a screen anyways so arguing you'd be less distracted is a moot point.

Moru 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Speaking of things not supposed to be done while driving: We tested the Android car GPS thing this summer. The passenger is usually in charge of the GPS so the driver can concentrate on driving. But this darn thing says something like "touch input disabled while driving". So we still have to stop the car to do adjustments on the GPS. Very handy on the Autobahn, you can't just pull over and park... Who does things like this?

Sadly all other GPS navigators we used to use has gone downhill to the state of unusable so this is what we turned out using all vacation.

71bw 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

If in a VAG car you can just disable the driving detection via VCDS like any normal person would and have everything work fine again:-)

6510 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The commodore 64 had 4 large Function keys on the right. I think 10 strokes per second was normal (I was among 12-14 year olds tho) Menus were structured like

   [F1] FOO
   [F3] BAR
   [F5] BAZ
   [F7] BAL
Small enough to instantly absorb in the wetware. Depending on how frequent the choice was used one would push options further down the sub menus. Say, something like this for HN (I made a tree, they would normally be separate pages)

    [F1] Index
    [F3] Threads
    [F5] Comments
    [F7] More [F1] Ask
              [F3] Show
              [F5] Jobs
              [F7] More [F1] Profile [F1] View
                                     [F3] Submissions
                                     [F5] Logout
                        [F3] New
                        [F5] Past
                        [F7] Submit
After you've submitted 2-3 things you just know you have to bash [F7] three times. To view jobs you hammer the bottom button then the one above. The hands will learn how to use the menus really quickly. I was often surprised that my hands knew how to take me places before really reading anything. Every time one used such menu it went slightly faster and it kept going faster. Pointing a mouse or using a touch screen is really slow. Could say it gets slower every time by comparison.

(The use of odd numbers wasn't even optimal)

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

You're really going to memorize the menu layouts to adjust the different settings for the seat moving when you turn off the car and open the door? You change that setting enough you're going to get a lot of muscle memory for that setting? Really?

6510 8 days ago | root | parent |

Yes, the lever to move the chair would be like a top level menu entry (It does only one thing)

vel0city 7 days ago | root | parent |

It seems you're not getting what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about the normal seat adjustment that you probably fiddle with a bit especially if you don't have profiles and change drivers a lot. I'm talking about the feature where your seat will go further back than normal to give you more space to get in and out of the car. It's often called something like "Easy Entry/Exit". Then when you start the car it goes back to where either the seat was last or whatever profile it was set to.

On this feature (which itself can be enabled/disabled), sometimes you can choose how far back it'll move the seat automatically for you.

Its this setting that you're suggesting you're going to mess with enough to have decent muscle memory to change without looking. That you'd want as a top-level feature setting option, practically a dedicated button to change it.

The video below shows what I'm talking about. Note in a lot of cars it's just a basic toggle. Sometimes you can set how far back you want the seat to go, if you want the steering wheel to move, how far you want the steering wheel to move, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhM-gJ5cIHA

Izkata 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> But I'd much rather just quickly tap a checkbox instead of press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press, press navigating the giant array of settings.

If I was making such an interface, that would be a dial or knob instead of buttons.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

Ok, so click click click click click click click click click press click click click press click click. In the end I'm still having to pay attention to the screen anyways, and once again the screen is probably going to be touchscreen anyways so it's extra hardware just to have a more complicated input system than just pressing the screen, taking up space in the cabin to have this redundant control scheme. Once again just to change settings I shouldn't be changing while driving anyways like how far back the seat should go when the car is off and I open the door or if the passenger side mirror should tilt down when reversing to help aiding in parallel parking. So critical to operate that with physical controls so one can change those settings while driving!

I've had far more rotary encoders fail than I've had capacitive screens fail, so even an argument of higher reliability is pretty moot. Most damage that would break the capacitive touch is going to damage the rest of the screen anyways.

Finally, if it's so I can change those settings while wearing gloves, wow I'm going to increase the complexity of the car and take up more space so I can change the settings on the secondary keys without taking off my gloves when it's really cold outside someday. So much stuff just so I can do that thing I rarely do anyways slightly easier for a few days of the year, assuming I'm changing those settings while also getting in and out of the car a lot so I wouldn't want to take off my gloves for a minute.

Just put the settings behind a touchscreen. It's fine.

Izkata 8 days ago | root | parent |

> Ok, so click click click click click click click click click press click click click press click click.

That doesn't sound like a dial/knob. You'd give it a single big twist or scroll to get the cursor around the right spot first. Same as old-fashioned radios.

vel0city 8 days ago | root | parent |

So a knob that doesn't even have the feedback of knowing when you've gotten to the next selection at all, you have to actually stare at it as it goes through the different choices. That doesn't seem better to me at all. Personally, in this idea of a dial I'd like one that can actually give some haptic feedback. Or even better yet just be able to actually tap on the option instead of needing to turn a dial to move a selector on the screen to choose it.

At least with an old-fashioned radio knob you got the feedback of if you were tuning into the station by hearing it. But moving a selector on a screen?

It's like you're arguing for the MacBook Wheel, as if a knob is the most optimal way to input arbitrary choices on a computer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

miltonlost 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

And so you can have physical buttons (left, right, up, down, enter) and a screen with a menu for all those options.

robocat 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> left, right, up, down, enter

Every UI using "simple" menu button navigation has been horrific in my experience. Remote controls, handsets, TV configuration menus, yadda yadda.

NeoTar 9 days ago | root | parent |

Discoverability is also an issue touch screens can help with - I enjoy that in the settings app on iPhone (I believe android is the same) one can search for a setting, rather than try to guess where a given setting has been placed.

Moru 9 days ago | root | parent |

But I don't want discoverability when my windshield suddenly fogs up and I can't see anything. I want to be able to just reach out and adjust the airflow without even thinking about it when I start noticing the fog in the first place.

Last time I had something useful was in my Volvo 740. After that it has been getting worse and worse. Even physical nobs can be bad, just round and smooth, without any physical notch that snows what direction it points.

NeoTar 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Oh, I completely agree - everything important should be accessible and intuitive - typically that does mean a well-placed physical control.

But there are so many settings on a contemporary car that it would be impractical to have a switch for all of them, and even if they were, if it's something you'd like to change once in a blue-moon being able to search for that setting is really useful.

I don't know if this makes great sense as an example, but, say you're travelling from the UK to France (or USA to Mexico?) and want to have your speedometer show km/h rather than miles/hour. That's not a setting which should have a switch, but may be something useful.

71bw 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

>I don't know if this makes great sense as an example, but, say you're travelling from the UK to France (or USA to Mexico?) and want to have your speedometer show km/h rather than miles/hour. That's not a setting which should have a switch, but may be something useful.

Three presses in a Mercedes on its speedometer screen.

vel0city 8 days ago | root | parent |

> Three presses in a Mercedes on its speedometer screen

> speedometer screen

> screen

So a setting behind a screen instead of a dedicated hardware button/switch/toggle for it.

71bw 5 days ago | root | parent |

You use the dedicated hardware buttons for controlling car options on the steering wheel.

I don't see why in God's name would you ever need that as a hardware switch.

vel0city 2 days ago | root | parent |

Many here argue there should be no screens in cars. The screen has some state you'll need to at least look at to get a bearing for where in the menu you'll need to navigate to. But most people aren't going to memorize the menu layouts for settings they rarely use, meaning they'll be looking at the screen when they interact with it.

Moru 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

The discussion is not about buttons for everything. Ofcourse I can't have a 737 cockpit from 1980 with buttons all over the place. Even planes get smart controls for the less used things. But the fan, the air direction and other very important and time sensitive controls HAVE to be physical in a car.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

In regards to dealing with windows fogging, I prefer the system in my car that automatically detects conditions where it might fog and adjusts itself accordingly. On top of that the car has a physical max defog button close to the actual driver controls.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

How is that better? Press press press press press press press press press press press press press press press cool just set one setting. Versus tap settings, flick scroll, tap to set.

giancarlostoro 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

In terms of doing it while driving, I'll take the buttons instead of a touch screen. I can press a button without looking at a screen.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

One shouldn't be adjusting practically any of those things listed while driving. That makes having it as a physical control moot. And having physical buttons to navigate a selector on the screen is still a terrible thing to do when driving anyways.

My rule of thumb is if it's on the center console I shouldn't be messing with it when the car is in motion. If I'm supposed to mess with it while moving it's on the wheel or immediately around it.

And tbh between my car with a zillion buttons I shouldn't be pressing while driving and a small screen and the car where most of those functions I shouldn't mess with while driving are on the screen I prefer the screen. Far bigger screen to quickly glance at the maps when driving instead of a smaller one that's harder to see. Less space to actually see the media collection when I'm stopped and can safely navigate it.

giancarlostoro 8 days ago | root | parent |

That's not always the case, some things on the center console include skipping songs, flipping between audio sources, etc. If you need to switch to an emergency radio station from bluetooth, its drastically more complicated because there's no physical buttons anymore.

vel0city 7 days ago | root | parent |

> skipping songs

That's on the steering wheel on practically every car I've had for over 20 years of model years.

You probably shouldn't be flipping between audio sources while driving. But even then, I've had change audio source as an option on steering wheels before. Generally, you shouldn't be fiddling with the radio when the vehicle is moving, you should be driving. Keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road, not on the stereo in the center console.

FWIW, in pretty much every car I've had since a 2012 model year I've been able to press a button on the wheel and say "tune to am 1510" and it'll tune that without having to take my hands or eyes off the wheel. Far preferrable than trying to look over at the radio to find the AM button again and figure out which knob is the tuning dial and then look to see I'm tuning to the right station.

giancarlostoro 7 days ago | root | parent |

> I've been able to press a button on the wheel and say "tune to am 1510" and it'll tune that without having to take my hands or eyes

Every time I try to talk to the voice assistant its the most horrible driving experience. It hijacks everything, and definitely sets me to where I have to pull over, or just stop trying to talk to it to get anything done. It does not understand me whatsoever.

James_K 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I think the added complexity is in areas where it doesn't really matter. The stuff the driver actually cares about is still the same as it was then. You can just put the rest in a bluetooth phone app. If it is more complicated than a button press, people probably shouldn't be messing with it while driving anyway.

tpmoney 9 days ago | root | parent |

I definitely don't want my car controls tied to a phone app. No matter what I should be able to configure my car's functions long after the company stops distributing their app. But there's no reason why we can't have a "best of both worlds" sort of deal. I have a modern Mazda with a touch screen that comes with a center control knob and has physical controls for a good chunk of the settings you'd ever want to change while driving. So I don't have to go through menus to change my air conditioning from low to high, but I also don't have to use a tiny character led display and a "push 3 times, then hold for 5 seconds then pull twice and rotate 37.8 degrees" multi function button to find and access settings outside of those physical controls. In fact, the touch screen disables touch input at speed, so the control cluster MUST be able to access any functionality without relying on the touch display. It works pretty darn well. In fact the only thing I'd argue it could do better is be more responsive and have a decent set of distinct tones for navigating the screens without sight. It's not often I want a setting in the menus while driving, but it would be a lot nicer if each menu screen had a distinct set of sounds so that by ear I could know where I am and memorize those controls if I needed to.

James_K 9 days ago | root | parent |

> long after the company stops distributing their app

There is a cool idea called open source, but I suppose something as radical as giving users ownership of software for their car isn't something companies would be willing to consider. Much better when you get to charge a subscription for heated seats.

tpmoney 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Even if its open source, I don't want to spend my own time or depend on other people deciding to keep the software working and building on newer devices just to configure car settings. There's no reason in the world to eschew a touch screen or other control interface in a car and instead put all the control in a phone app.

James_K 9 days ago | root | parent |

I would say safety is a big one. It's a lot easier for users to justify fiddling with a touch screen interface when it's a part of the car vs on their phone screen. Sometimes you want to make unsafe things harder to do.

tpmoney 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

If fiddling with the touch screen while driving is the issue, you can solve that with software lock-outs. The Mazda's touch screen stops responding to touches at faster than 5 MPH, and if necessary you could also lock out option and setting controls entirely while the car is in motion so that even the control knob couldn't be used to fiddle while driving. Moving control out of the already on board computer and control system and onto some external device is just plain over-engineering a worse solution.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

The vast majority of these settings are unavailable to even browse on my cars while the car is in motion. No need to go with putting it in a separate app. Which putting it in an app doesn't even prevent it, the driver could still just be messing with their phone anyways.

tikhonj 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Right, it makes sense to have the long tail of your functionality on the touchscreen, unless you want your car to look like an airliner's cockpit. Which would actually be cool but it would be a pain to learn and, presumably, quite expensive.

cesarb 9 days ago | root | parent |

> it makes sense to have the long tail of your functionality on the touchscreen, unless you want your car to look like an airliner's cockpit.

AFAIK, an airliner cockpit also hides the "long tail" of functionality behind multi-function screens (though AFAIK they use physical multi-function buttons and keyboards, instead of touch screens); only the essential functions have physical buttons (but there are a lot of essential functions on an airplane).

xyst 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> more functionality

The functionality you refer to is probably the creature comforts (ie, multi zone A/C, memory settings for front seats, …). But the essentials of a car (ie, transmission, wheels, structural integrity, windshield wipers) haven’t changed for decades.

What has changed though is:

- increasing size of vehicles due to increasing insecurity of American buyers

- a large majority of class C holders largely unprepared for the size of these vehicles

- this gives manufacturers the opportunity to stuff as much tech junk into these vehicles to give these less qualified drivers more assistance

- coincidentally, all of this tech junk comes with a very high premium for manufacturers and dealerships

Fear sells in this country. 9/11 changed the game.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Many of those essentials of a car have changed a good bit in the last few decades. Hybrid drive trains have become far better and far more common. Electric vehicle drive units are far better than they were before. Transmissions these days are far more complicated and achieve much better mileage than older transmissions and allow people to select gears electronically despite otherwise being an "automatic".

Designs for structural integrity are also different. Look at a 1997 Honda Accord and how big its windows are and how skinny those pillars are. Look at a modern Accord and see how big its pillars are. Look at a crash test of a 2000s Town and Country and compare that to a modern Pacifica. Radically different.

jabroni_salad 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

How many settings does a typical TV have these days? You can modify all of those with a d-pad. What is happening in your car that actually needs touch?

pnw 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Smart TV's effectively have touch-style interfaces as well now, where the remote is like using a mouse in free space versus the traditional D pad. The LG Freespace and Sony One Flick come to mind.

conductr 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I don’t think that’s what people want either. But there is a dozen or two features so commonly used that an analog control is the obvious choice.

One of my newer cars has only one physical control and that’s for volume. I never realized it before owning this car but I change the AC much more frequently than I change my audio volume.

CamperBob2 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It’s effectively impossible to assign a button to every thing.

My 95B.2 Macan: "Hold my bier and watch this..."

(Naturally, many of the 90+ buttons were gone with the next facelift, which is why the old one is still in my garage.)

bob1029 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Couldn't you still run a digital bus all the way and then have some conversion to/from analog controls at the end? Keep the computer but lose the screen?

The interface is the problem, not the underlying information representation or communication.

karaterobot 9 days ago | root | parent |

That's a good idea, but I think at least part of the reason it's more complicated is that you have to design and fabricate a new face plate for the dashboard, and get a new set of controls every time you want to change something on it. Say you wanted to add a new button on a particular trim level only, because it has a feature that the other levels don't. You'd need to either redesign that whole part of the console for just that trim level, or else sell everyone at a lower trim level a console with an extra button that does nothing. Multiply that by N, for every tiny feature you want to sell on the higher trim levels. If you've got a digital display, of course, you can just go crazy and add all the UI elements (and features) you want.

akira2501 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> You'd need to either redesign that whole part of the console for just that trim level, or else sell everyone at a lower trim level a console with an extra button that does nothing.

Not necessarily. Sony has joysticks that can snap in and out of the advanced controllers. It wouldn't be hard at all to design a backing circuit board that supports this behind the trim. Switches aren't exactly delicate parts either so it's conceivable that a cheaper system could use auto shops to solder in a new switch into the board.

You could also have a simple multiplexed interface board near the head unit and the switches could use simple two wire connections back to that board. Or the head unit could just have this built into it. Or you could design and use a HID like protocol so different interface adapters with different capabilities could be plugged and unplugged from the system.

Is this worth the cost? Short term probably not but long term you might be able to make these accessories much more generic and so reusing them in newer designs might actually lead to good savings. Plus you'd spawn an active third party market for these parts.

Rumudiez 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I have a couple 15-20 year old base trim level cars and they use the exact same dashboards as their premium siblings. The unused button spots are still there they just haven’t been punched out yet

miki123211 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

This actually makes sense.

If you want the car to be fully customer configurable, you basically need a custom dashboard for every single car. You also need to think about what happens when the customer does an upgrade.

qwertox 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

These buttons are usually located so close to each other, that one PCB can hold many of them. Then you need just one set of wires which connects the ECU to the controller on the PCB.

consteval 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I would think, however, that a lot of these car companies already had assemblies for analog switches. I don't know the cost analysis, but maybe switching from analog to touchscreen and now back to analog is more expensive than if they just stuck with analog.

Also this is a safety problem. IMO, this should be regulated. In the US we kind of do - we require a physical button for the hazard lights. That's why in modern Teslas that's the only physical button.

nuancebydefault 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Cost and durability as well. Physical knobs wear out because of friction and dust.

dredmorbius 9 days ago | root | parent |

In well over five decades of experience with automobiles I have never once had a physical nob wear out. In my own vehicle, or those of anyone I've encountered.

I'm not saying it never happens, but it would be an exceptional outlier circumstance.

kjkjadksj 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

My old head unit was all buttons and slipped into the dashboard in one piece with one plug too. In the custom stereo world having a touch screen interface always carried a premium over good old buttons. I’m not sure why that should change. Screens are much larger and full color on touch screen cars too compared to basic lcd alphanumeric screens.

globular-toast 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

This is it. I don't know why so many people think touch controls are a misguided attempt to be better. They are a definite attempt to be cheaper, that's all. This is why most electronics made in China these days have touch buttons. They are cheaper and they are almost always worse.

conductr 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It’s cost for sure, but they were also able to sell the tech packages so it was also fulfilling a demand too.

seanmcdirmid 9 days ago | root | parent |

Ya, cheaper design/production costs plus a tech feel for being new, but I bet in the future you’ll be able to buy analog buttons as a premium upgrade.

stubish 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

If that is the deciding factor, you can put the buttons and knobs on a face plate mounted on top of a touch screen, with the unpowered buttons just acting as fingers. But I don't think manufacturing cost is the real issue.

jsd1982 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

A touchscreen with an entire software engineering department behind its software is cheaper than buttons?

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

You make the software button once and it's there for the many millions of cars. You have to actually manufacture and stick in the many millions of buttons otherwise. Besides the actual action was going to be software on the bus anyways. Your window switch hasn't been directly connected to a motor in decades. It's sending a "window down" message to the bus that goes to the window actuator unit that then drives the motor. You're still paying someone to make it computerized anyways, you were going to pay a team of designers to draw it up and make the plans for the physical switch as well.

The screen was going to be there anyways due to backup camera requirements and because consumers want AA/Carplay.

collinmanderson 9 days ago | root | parent |

> The screen was going to be there anyways due to backup camera requirements

This. Backup camera requires a large screen leaving little room for buttons.

71bw 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

>This. Backup camera requires a large screen leaving little room for buttons.

?????? A Chrysler Town & Country has a 6-ish inch screen and still easily runs a backup camera feed which is more than clear enough for anybody.

MostlyStable 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Evidence suggests that their engineering teams are either not that big or not that good given how garbage most vehicle UI/software is, and it's a price you pay (mostly) once per touchscreen software design, which will span several models, where as the component + install cost needs to be paid for every vehicle in perpetuity.

ahartmetz 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

If you haven't been there, you cannot imagine how bad most car manufacturer's software departments are. They are big, expensive, and crawling with bad practices. Management usually doesn't have a clue about software, so there's a lot of maneuvering with goals being anything but producing good software quickly and cheaply.

daniel_reetz 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It's a little deeper than this, software for each module is typically provided by a tier 1 or tier 2 supplier according to a spec provided by the OEM. Sometimes the tier 1 or tier 2 supplier is also subbing out the software or stuck with some system on chip that sucks.

So for a made-up example, GM wants to build a smart dash in the latest SUV, maybe Bosch or Continental has one with a SoC inside and their own software hell. OEM works with supplier to integrate, bugfix, skin, and customize. But they don't write it from scratch.

caskstrength 9 days ago | root | parent |

Yes, and suppliers outsource the actual development and testing to cut costs even further.

ahartmetz 9 days ago | root | parent |

AFAIK, car manufacturers want to bring more software in house as a core competency, which is probably good because the "Tier 1"s are generally even worse at software than them and have worse aligned incentives.

tikhonj 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

The fact that software is bad is not evidence that it was built by a small team or had a low budget. A depressing amount of high-budget, large-team software is awful.

cmrdporcupine 9 days ago | root | parent |

This is absolutely true, but if you scratch the surface of teams like that what you'll usually find is terrible management more interested in shuffling paperwork and CYA than in quality and excellence.

BurningFrog 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

If there are enough buttons, yes.

Toyota makes 10 million cars a year.

Another angle is that you can add/remove/relabel software buttons later. Hardware decisions are much more final.

dwelch91 9 days ago | root | parent |

When I worked at Toyota (well, NUMMI) in the '90s, the engineers from Toyota Japan that told me: "I'd kill my mother to save $1 on each car produced." Yes, at Toyota's scale, $1/car is a lot of money.

dghlsakjg 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Yes.

The buttons still need to be programmed to do something so the cost savings isn't really on the software team.

Having a standard touchscreen that you can slap into any of your cars, and update OTA is huge.

nomel 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

This makes the incorrect assumption that the infotainment system would be removed, reducing the cost of the engineering.

Adding a virtual button in an infotainment system is much cheaper than a physical button. Especially since the most cost effective routing of those physical buttons would be to the infotainment system that is going to be there regardless.

izacus 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Remember that someone needs to manufacture those buttons, install them in the factory, stock them for replacement and keep them around several countries in the world in warehouses for when they break.

Now replace all that with a single screen and suddenly costs savings everywhere \o/

lomase 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The hardware buttons need a system, microcontroller with software or whatever, to manage its state just like the screen.

Triphibian 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Let's not forget you can charge a mint to replace the half-assed Ipad you have jammed into the dashboard when it goes bad.

robocat 9 days ago | root | parent |

Why do people think this?

Can you find any annual report from a car manufacturer that shows parts sales contributing significantly to profit?

Yes, dealerships make money from servicing and parts: "the service and parts department, which accounts for the other 49.6% of the dealership's gross profits".

But a car manufacturer doesn't capture that, so a manufacturer has no financial incentive to increase profits for dealerships.

Triphibian 9 days ago | root | parent |

Well, I hope to god AC Delco makes at least some profit from selling parts.

robocat 9 days ago | root | parent | 

  ACDelco is an American automotive parts brand owned by General Motors
It isn't clear that AC Delco would have any incentive to supply bad parts so that AC Delco could sell replacements and profit.

FYI Toyota owns an equivalent parts supplier called Denso.

hyperadvanced 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

That isn’t really true when you factor in the cost of engineering new parts/systems compared to just doing it like you’ve always done.

I know a guy who worked at GM and apparently they got bit by the “digital transformation” bug and decided that the army of iPhone app developers and ex Silicon Valley folks was what they needed to stay relevant. Hence the omnipresent touch screen.

Laremere 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

gaudystead 9 days ago | root | parent |

One of the deciding factors for me going for a Mazda (currently being shipped!) over other brands is because they still use a real gearbox (and not a CVT), and because their media system controls are physical buttons and not a touch screen. I hate taking my eyes off the road and the Mazda seemed like the safest option to reduce that as much as possible.

AlexAndScripts 9 days ago | root | parent |

I'm new to cars - I haven't passed my test yet. I also live in the UK, where manuals are the norm (and that's what I'm learning on). What is it that you dislike about CVTs? When you say a real gearbox, is it manual or automatic?

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

Not the person you're replying to, but I know what they're talking about.

CVTs work by a "belt" riding on "cones". These cones can slide in and out and change the size of each side, meaning they can change their gear ratio dynamically. This is great in many ways: the vehicle can always get exactly the gearing it wants for a given situation and there's no shift lag or shudder or whatever. Just nice, smooth, continuous adjustment of the gear ratio.

However, that belt riding on the cones depends on a good bit of friction to work. Friction means wear and tear. For a car level CVT, they make it out of a lot of little metal wedges on a metal band instead of what you'd normally think of a belt. However, it'll still constantly wear out leaving lots of tiny metal shavings. Owners are typically pretty bad about actually maintaining their cars, so transmission fluids and belt replacements often go long or skipped entirely leading to early deaths for these transmissions. Plus, you typically can't put as much power through them without risking damage.

They probably mean a real transmission as in one with actual interlocking gears whether that be automatic or manual.

MostlyStable 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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".

layer8 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

tikhonj 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

StephenAmar 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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 totally knew.

seb1204 9 days ago | root | parent |

I always like the centre console round knob in BMW, Audi and Mercedes. Clicky wheel type of haptic feedback and some buttons around it. They worked intuitively for me and you could pair them with a touch screen. I think a big issue with having a touch screen AND physical buttons is that it requires a lot more coordination between the teams to make it work well.

amelius 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Of course they knew it. But they __also__ knew that buyers wouldn't figure it out until after buying the car.

Fast forward a decade, and now buyers want buttons.

jiri 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Yes - people also would prefer to buy car with fancy big screen to buying car with lot of old school buttons. Because of fashion. After while, when big screen is not that fancy anymore, design can return to be functional again ... using physical controls.

creesch 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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).

josefrichter 9 days ago | root | parent |

I am not sure about the cost reasoning. The cars were equipped with all the buttons and knobs before the touchscreens. Then they started adding touchscreens - and it was the screens that were expensive, not the buttons that were already there.

But they went too far and moved everything to the screens. It's fine for big portion of the controls, but it's a big no-no for the controls you need to use while driving. And that's just a few buttons, to be honest.

Anyway, a decent design process would figure out. Seems like inner politics won instead.

creesch 9 days ago | root | parent |

> and it was the screens that were expensive, not the buttons that were already there.

The combination of a screen AND buttons is still more expensive than just a screen. If you are introducing a new component that is going to otherwise raise the cost of production, you will be looking for ways to reduce cost or, maybe more aptly, offset the cost of the new component.

With touch screens, you are presented with a unique option where the thing you introduce can be used to move all sorts of functionality to that would otherwise need its own hardware.

You also need to keep in mind that the physical buttons on older cars didn't need to be tied into a computer system as much as modern buttons.

> Seems like inner politics won instead.

Yeah, that's exactly my point.

matthewdgreen 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

steveoscaro 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

yabones 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

skrebbel 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

I love that my Ford Focus' HVAC system is entirely disconnected from the rest, and fully button/dial controlled. I can turn off the infotainment screen radio thing and the HVAC unit still does its job. I love knowing that some software or hardware fault in the clumsy infotainment mess that every car maker ends up with won't get in the way of temperature control. We had a Citroen before, and "make it warmer" was multiple menus deep down the terrible touch screen swamp. It was obscene.

I actually wanted that Mazda, which takes the same idea to the max, but I couldn't justify the cost difference just for the buttons (it also looks way cooler than the Ford of course, but ok). The Ford strikes a decent balance IMO - besides the 100% buttonized HVAC, it has a touch screen for all the touchy navigationy carplay-y stuff, but eg volume control and map zoom have physical dials and play/pause/skip all have physical buttons too.

My wife and me disqualified most other brands purely for this reason. We'd open marketing sites and skip through the promo photos until we saw a picture of the dashboard. No buttons? Close tab. I love that apparently more brands are now figuring out that "ipad on wheels" designs drive people away.

chrbr 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I agree, I love the Mazda approach to this in my CX-50. I'm not even sure if the display is touchscreen or not, because I always use the wheel-clicker thingie in the console to control it.

This was an intentional design choice from Mazda, of course, that goes hand-in-hand with their philosophy of giving such control to the driver that they "[feel] oneness with the car, as if it is an extension of their body." [1]

When searching around for a quote like that, I found a HN discussion from 2019 about the Mazda decision to eliminate touchscreens. [2]

[1] https://www.mazdausa.com/discover/human-centric-design-puts-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335

joezydeco 8 days ago | root | parent |

Mazda only enabled the touch on the LCD when the car was stopped. It seems that with the Gen4 models (2019 onward) they just cost-reduced the sensing circuit out of the design and nobody has really complained. Taking that layer out also reduces the spidering issue when the OCA fill rewets.

tristor 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Same here, I went out with a sizeable budget and tried out many cars and ended up with a 2024 Mazda 3 Premium last November because it was the only vehicle that had every control available in a tactile way. I love the car still a year later, and this is something every passenger has commented on. The center screen is a touch screen but it gets disabled once you go over 10mph.

IIsi50MHz 7 days ago | root | parent |

My Honda Fit 2015 is fond of displaying temporary banners on the touchscreen, declaring "This feature is not available while the vehicle is in motion.". But it never tells me _what_ feature is not available. I can't even remember the last time something was actually unavailable while in motion. Of course, I've gotten used to ignoring the message, except to sometimes wonder why it doesn't tell my which feature is unavailable.

theonething 8 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Having to go into a menu to change from vents to defrost is crazy

I don't know about the other makes you mention, but with my 2022 Subaru Crosstrek I turn on defrost with a physical button.

ngokevin 8 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Newer Subarus are more full touchscreen. Either 2020+ Outbacks, or 2024+ Foresters. And they have pretty ugly UIs and poor usage of the screen real-estate as well. It looks like the backup camera or Google Maps only use 7" of screen.

HerbMcM 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

andybak 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

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?

amatecha 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Right? When I worked in the office I kept a copy of Apple's Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines on my desk. It's amazing how "solved" a ton of that kind of stuff was, 30+ years ago. If you design software / UI and don't know the history of HCI and its top players, well…

permo-w 9 days ago | root | parent |

Slightly tangentially, just now reading the first section of the guidelines concerning metaphors, it's interesting, and an illustration of how far computers have taken over our lives, that now that a lot of the traditional UI metaphors are likely far better known for their software purpose than their original real world meaning

lolinder 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

lwn 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

motohagiography 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

the obvious consequence of electric vehicles is live configurable filters and patches for performance tuning. I want an ADSR for my accelerator in different modes. give me an EQ for acceleration and braking, along with a feedback cycle for cruising, and the era of performance personalization will be huge.

I would buy a tesla instantly if you gave me a eurorack dashboard insert!

eurorack module designers have moved hardware interface design to where they can create intuitive design languages as well.

Nition 9 days ago | root | parent |

Plus of course, you'd be allowed to swap out the pedestrian-warning spacehip noise that EVs make at low speeds with a synth creation of your own.

cbzbc 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Similarly, I find mixing on a tablet slower than mixing on a console with tactile controls - because you can do things like change multiple things by different degrees at once (you don't have to look at both controls to ensure your fingers are tracking) and adjust a control while looking at the stafe.

TheRealPomax 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

A poorly designed synth doesn't generally cause a car accident though, far less of a legislative impetus to stop softwaring everything in synth-land =)

qwertox 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Its so great when you know where the buttons are located, that you can touch them in the darkness without them suddenly selecting anything. When you need to make sure "is this the second one from the left?", then apply some force to actually change its value.

jncfhnb 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Ah but have you tried the conductive touch pads on the Strega that make your body’s conductive properties a human patch cable?

0xbs0d 9 days ago | root | parent |

No but I have a microfreak that has something similar :) It's cool but buttons and knobs are better.

elwebmaster 9 days ago | prev | next |

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?

potato3732842 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I hate this take because it's just doubling down.

Trying to legislate exactly what is and isn't in cars is exactly how we got touch screen everything in the first place.

I have less than zero faith that doubling down and adding another layer on top will not cause more perverse 2nd and 3rd order consequences.

electriclove 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

No, it shouldn’t be illegal. If it is inferior, they will lose sales and money.

dredmorbius 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

The automobile industry is one of the canonical examples of the market failing to deliver safety or efficiency until compelled to do so.

Ralph Nader in 1967, 57 years ago, interviewed by Studs Terkel:

<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/ralph-nader-discusses-...>

Direct audio: <https://s3.amazonaws.com/wfmt-studs-terkel/published/11364.m...> (MP3)

(The segment is excellent, and whilst in many ways a historical document also strongly informs the recent past, immediate present, and I strongly suspect the future.)

GrantS 9 days ago | root | parent |

This is an amazing archive of interviews. The audio quality is astounding — you would think these were podcasts from this week. I enjoyed the 1959 discussion with Arthur C. Clarke as well: https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/arthur-charles-clarke-...

dredmorbius 9 days ago | root | parent |

It really is. To quote an earlier comment of mine, the interview archive is immense and diverse. It spans 45 years, from 1952--1997, ran 1 hour each weekday, and the interview guests range from the highly famous to street and school interviews. I've hit on a few gems in particular.

The AWS back-end could be browsed or downloaded directly via AWS tools a ways back, and was about 600 GB last I'd checked. You'll have to sort out your own directory of content, however. Much of what's in there still isn't included in the official directory, again, at last check, though that includes numerous fragments and partial-tape interviews.

<https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/>

(Previous discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39628701>.)

twobitshifter 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

It’s naive to think that cost cutting is leading to lost sales. People may in fact buy the inferior car because it’s more affordable and then end up driving something dangerous.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I'm not playing Call of Duty mobile or watching YouTube on the screen on my head unit. I'm not scrolling TikTik or having a text message conversation on a head unit screen. If you think it's the same thing, you haven't actually driven a car with a screen before.

CrimsonRain 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Because you're not thinking and blindly hating. Maybe try to learn and change how you use a car dash instead of trying to use a Tesla (or similar) like a car from 2005.. Teslas are best selling cars for many reasons and touchscreen dash is one of the most important ones.

7thpower 9 days ago | root | parent |

I love Teslas but hate that feature.

Why would you want the most used features to be on a touchscreen?

CrimsonRain 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Which ones?

Gear change: drive/park/reverse. Always using when stopped.

Music: has physical control to change + voice

Volume: same

Side mirrors folks: same + auto

Climate: profile + voice The only thing that I found I need to fiddle with touchscreen (one physical button -> one touch button) while driving is rear fog light. It's neither auto nor supported by voice.

It's an easy software fix; not sure why they didn't add it yet. The software even recognizes the command and says not available yet.

Schiendelman 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

The most used features aren't only on a touchscreen. I feel like most of the people who make these comments have just not driven one.

esskay 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

m463 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Tesla is the worst.

why would you want to select your gear on the touchscreen?

I wonder how many sales they lose on the new models because the turn signal stalks are gone? (all stalks)

__turbobrew__ 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

A coworker told me a story where they drove a Tesla to Tahoe Lake and it started snowing. The Tesla sensors did not pick up the snow so the windshield wipers never came on. After nearly crashing the car because they couldn’t see, they pulled over and it took them a long time to find out how to turn on the wipers through the touch UI.

I hate hate hate non-analog controls in cars.

m463 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I rented a model 3 from hertz a while back. First time in a model 3, and I couldn't figure out how to lock the car. I finally figured out how to lock it on the touchscreen, but then I would open the door and get out and it would unlock again.

I finally figured out two ways to lock the car, but it took a bunch of web searches to get it.

offices 9 days ago | root | parent |

On one hand I've always been irritated by car reviewers complaining that a car has 'weird' controls, failing to take into account that most of us aren't driving a new car every week and will just adjust to what we use.

On the other hand, some cars are destined for fleets, and all may need to be operated by a stranger in an emergency. There should be a common configuration for features related to safety and velocity.

nilkn 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

At the risk of sounding snarkier than I actually intend, this is great example of why so much Tesla criticism online should be ignored or at least taken with a huge grain of salt.

I could criticize your coworker for driving a vehicle off into nature and dangerous weather conditions without taking a few moments to learn how to operate its most basic functions. But I don’t need to, because all I really need to point out is that they could’ve just clicked the button on the turn stalk to turn on the wipers. No touchscreen needed.

In all seriousness, though, they need to be a more careful driver. Driving a vehicle without knowing how to drive it is the fault of the driver and puts other people in danger.

__turbobrew__ 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Turn stalk controls have been standardized over the past 60+ years. Why change something which works for everyone already?

Maybe telsa should switch the brake pedal and the accelerator next.

Maybe cocacola should switch which way you twist the bottle cap to get it off? Surely it is the user’s fault if they cannot open the bottle.

nilkn 9 days ago | root | parent |

1. Operating a heavy, dangerous piece of machinery in the field without learning how to operate it first is most certainly the operator’s fault. That’s careless, irresponsible, and endangers others. If they had hurt or killed someone, they would’ve been prosecuted and would possibly be in jail right now.

2. Taking a few moments to learn to click a button in a car you bought is far from unreasonable, especially when everyone knows going in that a Tesla is not a completely standardized vehicle. The risk posed by this change is orders of magnitude less than the risk imposed by swapping the brake and accelerator pedals, so that is far from a fair or reasonable comparison.

3. You may not appreciate the benefits of the changes that Tesla made, as these things are ultimately subjective, but those changes contributed to the Model Y becoming the best selling vehicle on the planet.

Now, if your coworker had rented a car and unexpectedly received a Tesla, I could sympathize more. A car rental company should not rent out non-standard vehicles unexpectedly. However, it’s always the responsibility of the driver to learn to operate the vehicle first before getting on the road and endangering others.

elzbardico 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> Operating a heavy, dangerous piece of machinery in the field without learning how to operate it first is most certainly the operator’s fault. That’s careless, irresponsible, and endangers others. If they had hurt or killed someone, they would’ve been prosecuted and would possibly be in jail right now.

I think I've got a driver's license that allows me to drive from Toyotas to VW, from Dodges to BYD without having to read the manual for basic usage.

And yes, I usually do read the manual even on rented cars, but not because I need to figure out how to operate the turn signals or windshield wipers.

If Tesla wants do things their way, we should do like an aviation and require type certification as we do for pilots to be able to operate more complex planes. Let'see how Tesla's marketing would like this.

elzbardico 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

You shouldn't have to read the documentation for basic usage of a vehicle. Basic things like turning signals, lights, windshield wipers, locking and unlocking, windows work basically the same in most vehicles.

You are with a friend, and they are not feeling well, with most cars you can just take the wheel and drive as long as needed without having to look at the manual to figure out how to operate basic safety features.

I don't hate Elon, neither I hate Tesla, but I don't fucking want an "opinionated" car. Those changes bring no benefit other than saving a few minutes of assembly time and a few parts on the Bill of Materials, and all those benefits are for Tesla, not for me as a customer or a driver.

CrimsonRain 9 days ago | root | parent |

Plenty of customers and drivers disagree with you.

btw, the whole manual, with search option, is in the tablet.

bitsandboots 9 days ago | root | parent |

Rather than suggest customers and drivers, and their friends think reading a manual for basic operation should be done as you suggest, I propose it's more likely that one of the following is true:

* The owners silently put up with inconveniences. I don't know why the majority of people browse the web without adblockers but if they can put up with that, they can put up with bad car UX

* Sunk cost fallacy

* Fanboys, which very much will put in more effort to make something work than your average person would

consteval 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

IMO Tesla succeeded despite their obvious driver UX flaws, not because of them. Many consumers were/are willing to look past it.

ktosobcy 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 1. Operating a heavy, dangerous piece of machinery in the field without learning how to operate it first is most certainly the operator’s fault. That’s careless, irresponsible, and endangers others. If they had hurt or killed someone, they would’ve been prosecuted and would possibly be in jail right now.

Yet I can switch between very different cars and "it just works" and I dont' have to go through the darn manual each time... weird inni't?

> 3. You may not appreciate the benefits of the changes that Tesla made, as these things are ultimately subjective, but those changes contributed to the Model Y becoming the best selling vehicle on the planet.

_Something something correlation something something causation_

Have you considered that Tesla mayb got to that point because it was 1) very efficient and 2) Musk has a cult-like following (something akin Apple users making pointless decissions) even DESPITE dumb solution like tablet stuck in the middle of the dashboard or stupid changes like this one?

CamperBob2 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Operating a heavy, dangerous piece of machinery in the field without learning how to operate it first is most certainly the operator’s fault.

BS. The only reason this example is dangerous is because the manufacturer changed things for no reason -- things that were working just fine.

See also the death of Anton Yelchin, which occurred because some "UX designer" was bored with the way gearshifts had worked since his or her grandmother learned to drive: https://www.cochranfirm.com/washington-dc/star-trek-actor-ki...

dm319 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

On my commute to work, I often run into a very sudden traffic slow-down. It's general practice round here to slow down carefully, checking rear mirrors and to put your hazard lights on as you're doing so. My hazards on my ID3 are not a proper button (it is a 'touchbutton'). It is awful, I can't find it by feel, but I want to keep my eyes on the road in these kind of situations.

newZWhoDis 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Funny, because teslas (even without stalks) have physical buttons for the wipers (either on the wheel, or the left stalk push button).

Even outside of that, one of the most basic things any driver in a new car should do is familiarize themselves with standard controls (wipers, defrost, backup camera, turn signals, etc) before shifting into drive.

Sounds like your friends were danger to themselves and others on the road.

jdminhbg 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I press the button on the turn signal stalk to turn on the wipers on my Tesla.

m463 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

as of 2024 the stalks are gone.

CrimsonRain 9 days ago | root | parent |

Now it has a dedicated button for wiper. And you can use scroll wheel to adjust speed. So..?

pcurve 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I agree, that was one step too far. I really think there needs to be some regulations around what controls should be physical.

Thankfully, Japanese and Korean cars still have ergonomics. Hope they stay that way.

deergomoo 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

The indicators/turn signals are the most egregious omissions in a Tesla for me. Evidently no-one who made that decision has ever driven in the UK. I cross 8 roundabouts on my quick 20 minute commute into the office, good luck trying to find the right touch target to signal your exit when your steering wheel is at a quarter or half lock.

albert_e 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I actually want a few physical buttons on my phone and tablet.

Physical buttons to answer and disconnect a phone call, to mute the speaker (whenever ads popup on Spotify or YouTube say), to disable camera and microphone when you absolutely don't want to risk it (attending an office meeting while sitting on the toilet), etc. Without any dependency on screen being clean and registering touch properly or OS not being laggy at the wrong time.

bitsandboots 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Touchscreens on phones are even the best option, if only that there just isn't another viable option. You could even say the purpose of smartphones is "what kind of computing experience can we create with a touchscreen?"

This is an important difference over cars, where you don't buy the car for the joy of its computing behavior. You buy the car for transportation and any computing distraction from this could prevent the sale entirely.

albert_e 9 days ago | prev | next |

One of my favoirite projects in this space:

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.

pwrstick 7 days ago | root | parent |

Very cool knob. I would love to interact with this type of feedback (where it makes sense).

Funnily enough I recall using something less cool looking in a BMW 5 series from almost 20 years ago. The knob would stop rotating at the end of menu lists on screen when you could scroll no further.

It made sense, but I recall it being so novel that I spent more time trying to make it NOT move than actually just using the menu system.

BMW stopped using it for some reason.

TonyTrapp 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

walthamstow 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I was in the Philippines last week. Not only do they have touchscreen card POS devices, they also randomise the order of the numbers. Turns out I know my PIN by the position of the numbers moreso than the numbers themselves.

lifestyleguru 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Did it display an ad before displaying the keyboard? Because I encountered terminals which have physical keyboard but also display an ad on the screen. No physical keyboard? A perfect captive audience.

TonyTrapp 9 days ago | root | parent |

Luckily not. It was at a restaurant, and I hope that a waiter handing you a device to enter your PIN but first having to watch an ad is never going to be a thing.

JoshTriplett 8 days ago | root | parent | next |

It's a thing. Some large chain restaurants have a tablet at the table for ordering, with games on it, and continuous ads. It's the same one used to pay.

m348e912 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

m463 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

People with older teslas don't want to get the new ones.

They did away with all the stalks. The car guesses which direction you want to drive. Turn signals are buttons on the (rotating) steering wheel (or yoke).

The worst is that the touchscreen has very tiny targets. There's nowhere to rest your hands, you have to stab at them from the driver's seat (in a moving car) sigh.

GenerWork 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Enhance Auto has intriguing products that may be right up your alley[0]. That being said, they're obviously aftermarket and not OEM. Last I heard they were working on aftermarket stalks, but I'm not sure where they're at on that project.

[0] https://enhauto.com/knob

amluto 9 days ago | root | parent |

They lost me at:

> The S3XY Knob comes with a Gen2 Commander, which adds unique automation to your Tesla, such as automatically restarting your Autopilot after a lane change and turning off the wipers during AP drives. [emphasis added]

At what point should a company that builds products like that be liable for the damages they encourage?

For that matter, reckless endangerment and involuntary manslaughter are crimes in many jurisdictions.

nerdponx 9 days ago | root | parent |

> For that matter, reckless endangerment and involuntary manslaughter are crimes in many jurisdictions.

Yeah but good luck actually getting someone charged and convicted for these when a motor vehicle is involved.

hinkley 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

[flagged]

qwerpy 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

This attitude is a HN/reddit thing and the incredulity is a sign you spend a lot of time in that online bubble. The rest of us just buy what makes the most sense for us and our families.

vouwfietsman 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

It really isn't though. Regardless of whether the above comment makes sense, Musk is just an incredibly public figure now, even in non-tech spaces. Also including the word family in your wording is weird, I guess this is part of American political & economical parlance.

valval 9 days ago | root | parent |

Bringing up one’s family and its best interest might just be people with a family parlance.

vouwfietsman 9 days ago | root | parent |

Surprisingly, it is not. This is really a very American thing to say, I am not sure why. It is also political, and used to bring about some emotional gravitas to whatever you are saying, even if it has no application whatsoever, like buying luxury vehicles.

qwerpy 8 days ago | root | parent |

I said that to convey that practical family considerations (car is dependable, safe, requires little maintenance) outweigh things like "Elon is a good or bad person" and "I do/don't like his participation in American politics". When I didn't have a family, I could buy a car based on looks or speed or the politics of the CEO.

I didn't mean to imply that my reasoning has more gravitas than someone else's, it's that my priorities may be different because of my situation. Different priorities are fine! Hopefully there's a car for everyone.

compootr 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

if the product is the best fit for me, I don't really care that he's behind it

miltonlost 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

[flagged]

compootr 9 days ago | root | parent |

I get that you should vote with your wallet, but your $40k or so is pissing in the ocean for musk. he literally could not care less about your money

if you want to hurt yourself more than you hurt him, go for it, but I like choosing what'll benefit me the most (and while emotions about CEOs have some weight, I don't base my entire decision on them)

fwiw the product is okay (and they've got a pretty good network of charging gear so far) but I do enjoy my hybrid car with physical buttons!

MostlyStable 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Assuming that a Tesla is a vehicle that you would enjoy more than an alternative vehicle option or that would better fit your needs (which is presumably the situation if you are considering buying one), then the value you are giving up for yourself by going with an inferior-for-your-needs option far, far outweighs the money from an individual sale that goes to Musk. If you are willing to hurt yourself more than you are hurting Musk, then I guess sure, you do you.

vouwfietsman 9 days ago | root | parent |

Are you criticizing the entire concept of a boycott?

hinkley 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

They always do.

“If you don’t like it leave.”

<leaves>

“Quitter! Voting with your wallet is so pointless.”

MostlyStable 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I don't know why people feel this need to take the words that someone said and add an entirely new meaning to them. Notice that nowhere in my comment or the comment that I replied to does the word "boycott" appear (and the first comment doesn't even really suggest one). So much of the poor quality of discourse online is people doing exactly what you did: take a comment someone made and decide to interpret it in a way that makes the commenter seem bad and the person reading it feel good.

Here is (in my opinion) the civil way to make your point:

Yeah, it's probably true that the value to the individual is greater than the value that Musk gets (this is the entire concept of consumer surplus), but in some cases, an individual might feel it justified to take a hit for moral reasons, such as in a Boycott.

You are replying to the thing I actually said and inviting further discourse rather than asking a rhetorical question that you believe (likely incorrectly) that you already know the answer to.

vouwfietsman 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> I don't know why people feel this need to take the words that someone said and add an entirely new meaning to them.

I am genuinely curious to your definition of boycott and how that is different to what you and the original commentor are talking about. Note that this is not to say that I do or do not approve of a boycott in this case, rather I find it intriguing that you seem to argue that boycotts in general make no sense.

Also note that my comment is a question, and though I understand it can be read sarcastically, was actually not meant as such and so the entire reply you made is mostly an adversarial situation playing out in your head.

hinkley 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> I don't know why people feel this need to take the words that someone said and add an entirely new meaning to them.

This is playing games. Whether you intended it or not.

I called for boycott. You dismissed it. GP called you on it and now you’re playing dumb.

This worked in public discourse a long time ago but nobody buys it anymore. It’s a bad deflection.

HN is better at it than Reddit but there’s still way too many people who pretend like their reply has nothing to do with the chain of conversation they attached it to. Some of that is how we display follow-ups, but I can’t fix that.

lotsofpulp 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Yes, because the alternatives all wanted $20k+ for nickel and diming on basic functionality that a Tesla has.

It’s 2024, and somehow only Tesla or maybe Rivian has accessible video recording built in, even though all cars are covered with cameras.

I went into car buying thinking I wouldn’t entertain a Tesla due to lack of Carplay, and came out never wanting to step into a dealership again. So many stupid games they want to play, I just want to pick my color and pay for the car on my couch on my phone and pick it up.

Reason077 9 days ago | root | parent |

As much as I love CarPlay, I don’t miss it much when driving a Tesla because they’re one of the few car manufacturers where the built-in interface is just as good, and in some ways better, than what CarPlay gives you.

The things I do miss are the ability to run 3rd-party apps, and a decent voice interface: Tesla’s voice interface sucks very bad compared to Siri.

adventured 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

You give Musk money every time you pay taxes.

Or if you're outside the US, anytime you touch anything economic that has ever been priced in US Dollars (since the US runs a huge budget deficit which it finances through printing dollars, aka debt monetization, which is partially paid for by foreigners who interact with the USD directly or indirectly).

gigatexal 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

bhauer 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> Yes I do prefer analog controls. Dials for heat. Open close flaps for vents. On off switches.

Dials and switches can be fully digital (e.g., dials can be free-spinning, without locks at each end of a setting). So preferring dials and switches seems reasonable. But flaps for vents are very difficult to automate. Returning to manual flaps in cars would mean losing modern cars' ability to associate and restore HVAC vent preferences with driver profiles. It would mean returning to the time when it was actually necessary to adjust the HVAC vents every time you swapped drivers. While setting vent preferences on the screen may take a second or two longer than manually setting them, thanks to the setting being associated with my driver profile, it's a set-once-and-forget-forever setting. The net time and annoyance savings is large.

deergomoo 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Surely climate controls change far more based on the weather at the current moment than on the preference of the individual drivers? My wife and I have polar opposite preferences for cabin temperature and airflow, but even if the car remembered our preferred settings we would both be changing them frequently anyway.

I would much rather retain the ability to quickly change temp or re-orient a blower without taking my eyes off the road than for the car to remember that I like it cool and breezy and she likes it like a furnace.

finnh 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Thanks for explaining something I've never understood. I still think it is silly, tho - it makes sense only if each driver always wants vents pointing at the same place. my preferences change by season, by day, by hour, so needing to go through a screen is a time-loss and annoyance generator, not vice-versa.

allears 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

For me there's no set-and-forget-forever setting. Depending on the weather, how I'm dressed, how many other people in the car, whether there's a smelly diesel truck ahead, etc., that's a setting I need to change all the time.

bhauer 9 days ago | root | parent |

I guess everyone is different, but what you described absolutely doesn't resonate with me. I never have adjusted my HVAC vents after their initial configuration. Winter, summer, whatever. I always want the air to flow the same way.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

I practically never even adjust the AC. I set the thermostat and it handles itself regardless of if it's 110F or 10F outside.

bhauer 8 days ago | root | parent |

Same. That's the beauty of automatic thermostats. They target the temperature you specify automatically. So you specify your favorite temperature once and never interact with them again.

simoncion 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> But flaps for vents are very difficult to automate.

Why? If I'm correctly understanding what you're saying here:

> While setting vent preferences on the screen may take a second or two longer than manually setting them, thanks to the setting being associated with my driver profile, it's a set-once-and-forget-forever setting.

it sounds like vent position is already computer-controlled. Do I misunderstand?

So, take the "move the vent up, down, left, right, more open, more shut" controls that you indicate exist on the touchscreen and wire them up to sensibly-positioned freewheeling/non-stop/whatever wheels that have lights embedded in them to indicate the actual position of the controlled aspect of the vent. [EDIT: For bonus points, you could use force-feedback motors in the wheels to indicate when you've hit the edge of travel for the controlled vent aspect. (Assuming that Sony doesn't hold a PS5-era bad patent on force-feedback tech.)]

What am I missing?

m463 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> Apple had bought Tesla

lol. I think tesla was copying apple, relentlessly removing without knowing when to stop.

Apple has lost its way too in this respect.

samatman 9 days ago | root | parent |

I know right? Adding two buttons to the iPhone, an HDMI port and SD slot to the MBP, putting the function key buttons back, when will it end?!

m463 9 days ago | root | parent |

I have to give credit there, those were actually good moves. lightning too. But I'm still not back in the fold.

(and Tesla actually relented twice on the s/x - yoke horn button, plus added back a round steering wheel option)

JadeNB 9 days ago | prev | next |

> 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.

jsheard 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> presumably fancy processing that I guess sounded slick

I'm pretty sure that capacitive touch sensing is just cheaper than physical interfaces, it's more to do with corner cutting than being slick. All you need to create a capsense "button" is some traces on a PCB, they're essentially free if you're making a PCB anyway.

JadeNB 9 days ago | root | parent |

> I'm pretty sure that capacitive touch sensing is just cheaper than physical interfaces, it's more to do with corner cutting than being slick. All you need to create a capsense "button" is some traces on a PCB, they're essentially free if you're making a PCB anyway.

That makes sense. Thanks!

Zanfa 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I love how my stove’s capacitive buttons sometimes don’t register when I’m using one hand to stir with a conductive spatula while trying to turn down the temp with the other until I let go of the spatula.

bitwize 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Dishwasher, same thing. Half the time it won't register a press when I need it to turn on. Yet the cat can start a cycle when he decides he wants to have a climb.

liendolucas 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

deergomoo 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I actually don't mind the driver's display being a screen, because it has no controls and I don't have to interact with it besides looking at it. The most important things it displays (speed and revs) are mimicking dials anyway, but it's nice to be able to see things that most lower-cost manufacturers would never bother making a dial or numeric display for (primarily economy and remaining range, for me).

shrx 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I don't understand why I get a warning that tire pressure is low but no indication which tire is problematic.

jihadjihad 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

It’s a tricky problem because if you drive with a separate set of tires in winter/summer or anytime you rotate your tires the mapping from the TPMS to each tire would have be updated.

I don’t know enough about it to know if or how any manufacturers solve that—maybe it’s something that you can manually reset when rotating tires? My car is a 2016 so I’m in the same boat and stuck with a blanket “low pressure” warning.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent |

My 2012 car could report individual tire pressures for each tire. After a few minutes of driving, it would know which tire was witch even after rotating them.

It's not too difficult for the car to know which TPMS chirp relates to which tire.

squidgedcricket 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Do any modern cars have OBD readers integrated into the infotainment system?

It seems like a no brainer to show the error code w/ a description. Though that might decrease the number of dealer visits compared to a non-descriptive check engine light.

alexbock 9 days ago | root | parent |

Tesla vehicles display error descriptions prominently whenever an error code is presented, and detailed error diagnostics are available for anyone to browse in the service mode menu on the touchscreen. (Service mode is publicly accessible but does require looking up online how to open it.)

patrickhogan1 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

bitsandboots 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Tangents:

* Sony's naming scheme sucks. I will never remember the product names and the name difference between the headphones and earbuds

* the WM earbuds also have a bonus feature where there really isnt any way to turn them off other than to put them in the case, so they go through battery-destroying 80-100% charge cycles and last like 1-2 years before the batteries are at half capacity.

dalmo3 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I had to disable touch control on mine (gen 4) as it would detect touches from the pillow I was resting my head on.

The most annoying part is there are some buttons already on the phones for connectivity so the could have added more for basic functions.

averageRoyalty 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> These controls are 10x worse than the much older versions that had volume and pause buttons on the headphones.

I have the WH-1000XM2s and they do not have volume or pause buttons. Double tap to pause, slide up and down for volume. I can't comment on them compared to yours, but the touch element works extremely well on them.

_0xdd 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

fasteddie31003 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

vel0city 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I'm pretty pro touchscreen to a point. Any driving critical control should be physical. Lights, turn signals, horn, steering wheel controls, etc. Physical controls with physical feedback. Everything the driver should mess with should be either on the wheel or immediately around it and should be physical.

Other than that, I really don't care. When I'm punching in the address on the navigation system, give me a massive screen. When I'm stopped and trying to look up something in my media collection, give me a massive touchscreen. When I'm trying to quickly glance at the map, make it a giant screen so I can see it all quickly. Or better yet a HUD or have it on the instrument cluster.

pdimitar 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

"Could" being the keyword here. We're not there yet.

Also the touchscreens break muscle memory habits and don't give any feedback. These things are actually extremely important f.ex. in a car.

purplethinking 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Also, when it comes to cars, and probably other devices/vehicles in the future, they are increasingly operating themselves. You can buy FSD for Tesla and drive for hours in mixed highway and city streets without having to intervene. When you do intervene you can take control for 15 seconds and then give back control to the system. At that point, why put in buttons to optimize the experience for human drivers? This is true for other cars as well, but to a lesser extent, but the direction is clear.

mmooss 9 days ago | root | parent |

> At that point, why put in buttons to optimize the experience for human drivers?

Less optimization results in more accidents, injuries, and deaths.

purplethinking 9 days ago | root | parent |

Not if the car drives itself 99% of the time.

consteval 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

It doesn't though, and it never has, and I'm doubting it ever will. FSD is flawed from the conceptual stage. Roads are complex, constantly changing, and difficult to navigate. Other types of transportation, like rail or air, are trivial to automate in comparison. And then at a hardware level, Tesla also messed up. Pretty much any idiot could've told Tesla that a camera-only system won't work, but here we are.

FSD is a very small step above adaptive cruise control. It's more of a novelty than anything. I certainly wouldn't trust using it, and I don't really care what numbers say either. Tesla doesn't really play fair, being deceptive is a core part of their business. It's no surprise then that FSD auto shuts off right before accidents. We actually have no idea how safe it is, and I'm not going to be listening to what the guy selling them has to say.

mmooss 8 days ago | root | parent | prev |

However much time the person spends driving, less optimization for their driving will result in more negative outcomes.

TomK32 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

There's a interesting middle ground, programmable button that is also a rotary button that gives feedback, the KeWheel by KEBA. I'm sure that are similar solutions from other manufacturers.

jajko 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

You probably meant other industry but this is a terrible mindset for cars for example. Touchscreens are so terrible premium manufacturers ignored them for a long time since its obvious downgrade in comfort and safety, yet people kept buying teslas despite this, even bragging how cool some cheap ipad is.

numerative 9 days ago | prev | next |

I nearly crashed my car into the divider because I had to look away to adjust the car AC which has touch buttons instead of tactile.

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.

stargrazer 9 days ago | root | parent |

Probably why Tesla's have auto-drive. Car has to drive it self while you focus your attention on the screen to decode how it works.

jstummbillig 9 days ago | prev | next |

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.

eporomaa 9 days ago | prev | next |

Whoever thought touch on a stove is a good idea needs to destroy their internal design framework.

lynguist 8 days ago | root | parent |

Touch on a stove makes any stove I know gastritic. A drip of water and it turns on power mode by itself and melts lids. A bit of oil and it randomly turns on itself. A piece of wet cloth and it does the same. Sometimes even nothing at all triggers it.

pif 9 days ago | prev | next |

The elephant in the room is that a touchscreen wants all your attention, especially visual attention, while physical buttons let you operate them while keeping your eyes on the road.

bitsandboots 9 days ago | prev | next |

I really question what causes companies to ignore consumer opinion. It was obvious people wanted tactile controls. All they had to do was read comments, do user studies, ask for feedback... any sort of interaction with consumers at all.

Its easy to say it was for profit. But surely they cant be that bad at the math of frustrating their audience versus saving pennies.

I've similarly seen car companies doubling down on obviously hated design decisions for 10 years when it could be fixed with a refresh in 3. As if they have pride and spite rather than wanting to make money.

I have a feeling the core issue is companies do not have any interest in oversight of their designers and their designers are unhinged.

beowulfey 9 days ago | root | parent |

Profit is an easy answer but sometimes easy is correct. Companies are prone to view consumer opinion negatively if they know they don't have a choice. Look at Apple, for example--the removal of the headphone jack, the constant reduction in ports, etc.

bitsandboots 9 days ago | root | parent |

Profit just seems like TOO easy of an answer. Apple's an exception in some ways. They absolutely will do things out of spite. They hate admitting they're wrong and take as long as possible to fix UX flaws as a result. And sometimes the bad UX is a result of some misguided mission. Instead of cost cutting, it's just as plausible to me apple removed things because they have a fetish for minimalism and miniaturization.

internet101010 9 days ago | prev | next |

They've been back. One of the main reasons I went with the car I ended up buying was because it had buttons. And it's fast. And it has carplay. And I don't have to press the (A) button every time I turn on the car to disable the engine off at red light thing.

maleldil 9 days ago | root | parent |

> disable the engine off at red light thing.

Why do you do that? I find that it barely impacts my driving experience, and it's an easy way to decrease emissions.

VGHN7XDuOXPAzol 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

Not the person you're asking, but I find it adds a delay to setting off and frequently feels 'wrong' because it cuts the engine for a very short time.

(I don't often drive at rush hour, so often I might just stop at a light for literally 1 or 2 seconds whilst it notices I'm there and then switches over to green, or maybe I've timed it almost right to slow down gradually to the lights and only have to stop for a short time at the end.)

I don't know anything but I have been wondering if it might actually be worse for emissions and engine wear for the auto to cut off only for 1 or 2 seconds each time.

I can see the appeal in traffic with longer waits though?

maleldil 8 days ago | root | parent |

I envy that you only stop at lights for 1-2 seconds. Where I live, you'll find not only heavy traffic but also red lights that are several minutes long.

timbit42 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Isn't it hard on the starter?

39896880 9 days ago | root | parent |

The automatic stop-start system found in newer cars isn’t especially hard on the starter. These systems have reinforced bearings, faster engagement mechanisms, direct fuel injection or integrated starter generators, which start the engine without relying on a starter motor at all.

jordanmorgan10 9 days ago | prev | next |

I seem to be in the minority. I love the whole screen approach in my model 3. I can customize the bottom shortcuts how I like, the screen adapts to the context and things don’t feel more than 1 tap away. I’d take that over plasticy looking car buttons for the most part.

AdmiralAsshat 8 days ago | prev | next |

Thank God.

As a gamer, for me there is no more crystalized example of "Everything doesn't need to be touchscreen-based!" than comparing the excellent Gameboy Advance Game, "WarioWare Inc" to its touch-based sequel on the Nintendo DS, "WarioWare: Touched". Some of the same minigames that were previously driven by d-pad and buttons were now entirely driven by the touchscreen and stylus, and were much worse off for it.

Given that WarioWare: Touched! was released in 2005, it's a little depressing that it took the rest of the tech industry almost 20 years to learn from that mistake.

UniverseHacker 9 days ago | prev | next |

I’m into classic European cars and am horrified by the people replacing high end vintage german head units that integrate with the rest of the car, e.g. speed sensitive volume for shitty alibaba touch screens.

bofh23 6 days ago | prev | next |

I like multi-function displays (MFD) which were probably a necessity in aviation before touchscreen technology and also could be operated by a pilot with gloves on.

Multi-function display - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-function_display « a small-screen (CRT or LCD) surrounded by multiple soft keys (configurable buttons) that can be used to display information to the user in numerous configurable ways. »

I’d like a Thrustmaster Cougar MFD with USB interface on a flat panel screen, perhaps with both illuminated soft buttons and knobs with labels on screen. I wonder why they don’t sell one with a built in screen? There’s lots of DIY builds that add them.

grugagag 9 days ago | prev | next |

Im surprised touchscreens ever passed compliance for automobiles, in some cases they’re a downright danger.

vdvsvwvwvwvwv 9 days ago | root | parent |

To the point where if the touchscreen happens to be loose, and have it's own battery I could lose my license for touching it (unless maybe it is cradled).

flashman 9 days ago | prev | next |

Douglas Adams was satirizing touch interfaces and technological progress 45 years ago:

> A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive—you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

lstamour 9 days ago | root | parent |

Hot take: that sounds more like a critique of modern AI assistants. My Google Assistant used to be predictable. Progress isn't always progress.

anonymous344 9 days ago | prev | next |

these idiots does not understand that in the car your hand is moving up and down because road is uneven. Touch screen sucks in car if the car is moving

offices 9 days ago | root | parent |

Google Maps has a pair of buttons for you to confirm or deny that a hazard like a stopped vehicle is still there. But they're right next to each other. Two buttons that do the opposite from each other, irreversibly, and they're millimetres apart. Pressed while you're navigating a hazard.

AlienRobot 9 days ago | prev | next |

>Plotnick is [...] the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.

Something must be wrong with me. This sentence would sound so lame to the average person and yet it sounds fascinating to me. I wish I had the title of "the leading expert on buttons."

I really LOVE how the WHOLE article is about BUTTONS BUTTONS BUTTONS. It really clears any doubt about her expertise. It's not an exaggeration. It's an actual leading expert on buttons!

>The blind community had to fight for years to make touchscreens more accessible. It’s always been funny to me that we call them touchscreens. We think about them as a touch modality, but a touchscreen prioritizes the visual.

Really interesting observation. In order to press virtual buttons, you have to look at the screen to figure out whether the button is (unless it's a full-width button at the bottom). Physical buttons generally don't require this in order to be pushed. They may still require this if the action the button performs depends on a state that is indicated by a screen, e.g. a menu where you have directional buttons to change the selected item.

pigbearpig 9 days ago | prev | next |

This vid talks about how the MD-80 has different types of switches for different functions. Not sure if intentional, but the ability to know if you have the wrong switch by feel seems like a great benefit.

https://youtu.be/7R0CViDUBFs?t=429

Moment I question is at 7:09, but whole vid is quite interesting.

zzo38computer 9 days ago | prev | next |

I dislike touch screen; physical keyboards and controls are better, in my opinion. So, it is good that they are doing these things, in cars and in other devices.

There is the consideration of what buttons to have. I think that for many kind of devices, numeric keypads will be useful. This can include the time and power of microwaves, frequency of radios, telephone numbers, date/time to schedule something, numbered menu items, etc. Stuff such as CD and DVD players and VCRs might also have controls such as play, pause, stop, rewind, fast-forward, record, previous-track, next-track, etc. Anything with audio will also have high volume, low volume, and mute (use a dial might be used to control volume instead, on some devices).

Additionally, a remote control should not be required. The controls should be directly on the device itself, although remote controls (e.g. with IR) might also be available.

thrownaway561 9 days ago | prev | next |

with buttons, you can close your eyes and navigate the "map" of the device. I know that the top button of my tv remote is the power and the cross in the middle is for navigating the directional of the on screen display of the tv. I can find the middle button of the remote and 2 middle buttons down from the cross is the play/pause button.

You can't do this with a touch screen. There is no indication of surface or depth of feedback. True that you can have a "bump" feedback, but that is for basically ever "button" on the touchscreen so they all feel the same.

There is nothing to distinguish one button "area" from the other on a touchscreen. Now this isn't a big deal if you can look at the control, but what about blind people, trying to navigate in the dark or even worst... while driving???

Touchscreens have their place but they don't need to replace everything.

wslh 9 days ago | prev | next |

My first reaction after buying my Garmin watch was to disable the touchscreen since it already has buttons. For tracking different sports, the touchscreen adds a potential risk of accidental touches, which could affect measurements and performance. Plus, I'm not certain, but it may consume more battery. I chose this watch for its impressive battery life (including solar charging), so minimizing unnecessary battery use is important to me.

On the other hand, I find it unnatural to have physical buttons on a tablet. My brain takes a moment to adjust to the fact that the volume up and volume down buttons on the iPad reverse their behavior based on the device’s orientation. I would also prefer if fingerprint detection on the iPad were integrated into the display, as seen in some Samsung phones.

Animats 9 days ago | prev | next |

The article is mostly about buttons.

Buttons with a screen you have to look at are no better than a touchscreen. For cars, everything important should be do-able without looking. At least until Waymo's technology filters down to most cars.

scotty79 9 days ago | prev | next |

I think touchscreens could be fine, even in cars if they limited inputs to broad swipes. As for visuals it should rely on simple colors to encode functionality and provide feedback during operation.

The problem is feature creep where they want user to have so many functions that they have no choice but to use buttons and detailed graphics.

I think if the smallest buttons they used occupied at least quarter of the screen and if screen would have corners that you can physically grab onto when you are pressing they could be mostly fine-ish.

UX designers that design console experiences for visually impaired people would be the best people to create UI for cars. Although still not perfect.

kemiller 9 days ago | prev | next |

There’s a pre/trans fallacy at work in here. We are not returning to the buttons we had before, we are recreating the role of physical buttons in a world where the long tail of controls has somewhere to go. And I’m all for it.

speakspokespok 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Please expand on this.

You're saying the analog functionality behind a button, like an analog volume control is no longer a pontiometer, but rather a tactile UI element?

mmooss 9 days ago | prev | next |

> if we look at the 1800s, people were sending messages via telegraph about what the future would look like if we all had this dashboard of buttons at our command where we could communicate with anyone and shop for anything.

I've read a bunch of history of computers and related technology, and I've never seen that. Where can I find it? (I don't doubt it; I want to read it!)

It shouldn't surprise me: The telegraph made immediate, cost-effective wide-area communication possible, and of course people then weren't idiots (or we're not so smart) - some of them imagined future development and applications.

sharkweek 9 days ago | prev | next |

I drive a 2000 4Runner.

You know what I love?

Physical controls for heat/radio/shifting etc.

It feels precise and tactile.

My wife refuses to drive it, she much prefers the modern luxuries in cars, but there is something so satisfying about FEELING the interaction with a control.

Brian_K_White 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I dread the day my '97 4runner rusts just too much to ignore. They don't hold up to NJ well. I can afford anything and I hate everything current. Considering paying new trd pro price for whatever lovingly maintained 3rd gen I can find from the south or midwest. People have them, but they also love them and keep them. And a manual trans with 4wd is just even rarer. Maybe it will be worth actually buying just any version with a good frame and paying to have everything transplanted over. I can't stand automatic.

Or maybe go the other direction and hope that new Scout isn't just a fantasy. Even with the physical controls and generator, I hate that it will surely be fully computer operated and all by software I can't access or control at all. It will surely be nice physical controls and a pile of annoying wrong behaviors you can't fix.

2099miles 9 days ago | prev | next |

Especially in cars, especially in simple controls, touch screens are great for low screen real estate but cars are one of the dumbest places for them since there is so much real estate and so little need for a screen

dredmorbius 9 days ago | root | parent |

Screens have been mandatory in new US automobiles since 2018, due to regulations requiring a back-up camera:

"All new cars in US now required to have backup cameras" (2018)

<https://abcnews.go.com/US/cars-us-now-required-backup-camera...>

I can appreciate the safety rationale. I hate what this does to automobile interiors / controls, and suspect that the distraction / confusion factor may very well outweigh any possible life/injury savings due to the cameras in the first place. The alternative of incorporating the BUC display into the rear-view mirror, perhaps in addition to obstacle warnings, might be an alternative.

Absent that, a fold-down ceiling-mounted display would be my next preference. Anything to avoid having a persistent screen on the dash.

Mazda were apparently offering a heads-up display (HUD) as of 2019: <https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1121372_why-mazda-is-pur...>

(As noted elsewhere in thread by slipmagic: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42037412>.)

gwbas1c 9 days ago | prev | next |

Tesla, for all the flack it gets for removing buttons, "almost" has enough buttons.

It's fine to bury options / settings that you don't touch often, or ever, under a menu.

When driving, the steering wheel controls to change the audio / autopilot speed are "good enough."

What's missing?

I should be able to adjust the wiper speed with a dial on the stalk. (The automatic wipers are lousy, and if there was a dial on the stalk, I really wouldn't care.)

I should be able to adjust the heated seat with a dial, and maybe adjust the climate control temperature with a dial.

That's it. Just a few more buttons.

Schiendelman 9 days ago | root | parent |

You can adjust the wiper speed with the left wheel after tapping the wiper button.

gwbas1c 9 days ago | root | parent |

I hate that, because often when I go to adjust the volume it changes the wiper speed.

Buttons shouldn't have context when you aren't looking at them.

Stubbs 9 days ago | prev | next |

For me the idea of any kind of interface in vehicles should tend toward audio anyway. Anything that takes your attention away from the road, wether it's tactile or touchscreen is a potential distraction.

Voice control seems the obvious solution but there are probably better ideas, especially as someone who's accent confuses all but the best recognition, or well trained, software. I end up talking in an "American" accent to my car ... but then I do enjoy pretending I'm Michael Knight.

everdimension 9 days ago | prev | next |

Title sounds like a dream, but I don't really see it happening yet. I honestly think you have to be retarded to put a touchscreen into a car. But they don't seem to be making less of those

dfxm12 9 days ago | prev | next |

I've got a new car. I got the giant touchscreen because the model with the advanced safety features only came with the touchscreen. However, thanks to all the buttons on the steering wheel (which are the same on all models), I have to touch the screen approximately zero times while driving. It might as well just be a display.

That said, I am appreciative of people coming to their senses over this. Maybe not every car maker thought this out as much.

markman 9 days ago | prev | next |

Well I'm glad. I remember when ipods had no power button. I distinctly remember saying, "This is not good. Soon there won't be any buttons. Thanks Steve Jobs." Boy was I right. The best phone ever was the G1 with the little roller ball and slide out keyboard. So tactile is back. Now if we could just get back the removable battery and expandable memory.

WalterBright 9 days ago | prev | next |

I remember the EE Doc Smith Lensman series, when the characters "pressed a stud" rather than "pushed a button".

"Every firing officer in every Patrol ship touched his stud in the same split second." -- First Lensman

"before a firing-stud could be pressed, the enemy craft almost disappeared again",

"The Boskonian touched a stud and spoke." -- Gray Lensman

dredmorbius 9 days ago | root | parent |

Electro-mechanical relays were the emerging (and novel) standard at the time, if not direct physical linkages.

I once had the opportunity to tour a US railroad switch tower, likely dating to the 1930s if not before. As with much other industrial architecture, something most people may not realise is the extent to which the form of the structure is dictated by not only human requirements (elevated position to have an overview of the yard) but the technical mechanism itself.

The upper portion of the tower is dominated not only by the observation windows, but by a vast number of physical rods which control individual sets of points (track switches). The levers don't move the rails directly, but they do directly move the electro-mechanical activators in the tower base, from which rods or cables (I believe it's rods, I'm not positive however) make a continuous physical connection to each controlled set of points. That is, there is not a separate actuator at the points themselves.

(More modern switching systems, or even other older ones, may well have this. The tower I observed most certainly did not.)

I've also had an interest for some years in how the artefacts of control influence the language of control. We speak of the reins or levers of power in most European languages, reflecting older sources or projections of power; modern terms seem to have been slower to be adopted though some ("dynamo" and "engine") are extant. I've long suspected that the Chinese, with a millennia-long history of hydrologic civil engineering projects might have a language of power which borrows from water control structures (dams, gates, levees, bridges, etc.). Some time afterward I realised that Latin certainly does, and retains at least one descriptor in pontifex maximus, that is, "bridge builder in chief*, first applied to Rome's emperors, now its Pope. And I've very recently learnt that Vietnamese language and culture have many words with shared roots in water, including the word for "mother".

surfingdino 9 days ago | prev | next |

I find touchscreens in cars inconvenient and confusing. They increase my anxiety and add to the sensory load during driving. How did car manufacturers get away with equipping cars with devices that make you take your eyes off the road while using a phone while driving is banned is a mystery to me.

karmakaze 9 days ago | prev | next |

They aren't mutually exclusive. Sometimes it's easier to pinch to zoom/rotate, other times it's easier to adjust volume with a physical knob/buttons without looking. It's either marketing 'something different' or cost cutting that leads to these exaggerated non-optimal fads.

James_K 9 days ago | prev | next |

These stupid touchscreen controls are one of the main things that convinced me modern designers simply don't both testing and using the products they produce. If you take a touchscreen stove top and use it for more than about 5 minutes, you quickly find yourself wishing for the knobs back.

speakspokespok 9 days ago | prev | next |

Somewhat tangential to the topic but the picture at the top there, of the center console, how is the lettering applied? Is that a silk screening process of some kind that I can duplicate?

Asking because I want to duplicate the look of an OEM vehicle setup for a personal project.

"Guy Who Stares at Vehicle Buttons"

wwwlouishinofun 9 days ago | prev | next |

However, the problem is that touch is not optimized to perfection For example, I want to have the function of quickly opening an application by swiping up with four fingers on my iPhone. There is no killer optimization solution like bettertouchtool on iPhone

sfmz 9 days ago | prev | next |

I also welcome the return of physical media (incl. videogames); manually pushing in the cart/cartridge is a form of tactile control. That and a wired controller so I don't need to manage batteries and bluetooth when my nephews want to play videogames.

ajdude 9 days ago | prev | next |

My 2017 Mazda 6 is in almost perfect condition except for one problem: the touch screen has an issue with "phantom taps". Every time I stop the car, it either tries changing the radio station, making phone calls, etc, it's terrible

1zael 8 days ago | prev | next |

This is why I bought a 4Runner instead of a Tesla. Being able to grab, push, twist, and press buttons makes me feel one with my car. Relying on a screen feels one step removed. I want those buttons to click and clack!

voytec 9 days ago | prev | next |

I need to dry my hands before clicking "no longer exercising" on my Apple Watch after swimming. It adds my steps through the beach to the towel as the distance swum but allows using the physical crown/button to eject water...

gytdev 8 days ago | prev | next |

I'm below 40 and have problems with touchscreens just because I work a lot with my hands and they are constantly dry. Also touchscreens on a car are a very bad idea

Yeul 9 days ago | prev | next |

I had to pickup something I had ordered online from a postal locker. It had a touchscreen where I had to input the code but it register any input :(

Maybe it's just my bad luck but touchscreens always break.

WesolyKubeczek 9 days ago | root | parent |

Ah yeah, boy do I like miscalibrated (you have to tap way off a button to click it) touchscreens in these things.

Thankfully, for a lot of them I only need to use my phone to either show them a QR code or to open the locker from the app.

m463 9 days ago | prev | next |

I kind of wonder if touchscreens and apps are a way of firing customers. Get compliant customers that won't complain and will rent autopilot or buy range upgrades their cars already had the hardware for.

MetaWhirledPeas 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

I think it's mostly cost-cutting, but also a prompt for both designers and customers to expect less interaction. It fits in with the push for automation.

For cost cutting it might be going according to plan: Tesla is making a good profit on their cars.

The success of their automation efforts remains to be seen.

pipeline_peak 9 days ago | prev | next |

My biggest concern with touchscreens in cars is longevity, something often advertised by auto makers like Subaru and Toyota.

Say I own one for 15+ years, what happens when the firmware is outdated?

washadjeffmad 9 days ago | root | parent |

On an especially hot day, my ex's Civic touchscreen failed to boot, blocking her from using her AC, using her cameras or having full visibilty (the windows are so minuscule, it's like being in a submarine), being able to make or receive calls hands-free, or controlling her radio.

The firmware being outdated wouldn't be more of an issue than with any other head unit if they weren't internet connectable on top of being so integrated. I'm afraid someone has hard coded some service SSID to autoconnect to, and once the signing keys are cracked, that's all someone would have to do to push a compromised update.

I've made it a point never to own a vehicle that can accept OTA updates or that has always-on connectivity.

dzhiurgis 9 days ago | prev | next |

I’m fine with my Tesla touchscreen. It’s well designed and works better than Toyota or Nissans nightmare button layout.

There’s tons of third party buttons you can add. They don’t seem to be super popular.

koromak 8 days ago | prev | next |

I've held onto a 2011 car waiting for this swing. Maybe in 2026 I can get a modern car with genuine tactile controls

r00fus 8 days ago | prev | next |

I really love in my Kia EV6 that I can do almost everything with tactile controls. One of the major reasons I didn't get a Model Y.

WalterBright 9 days ago | prev | next |

I'm waiting for people to realize that icons are a horrible step backwards from language.

I defy anyone to come up with an icon that is better than "PRINT".

xxs 9 days ago | root | parent |

I do prefer all the icons to have text. Yet, localizing 'print', etc. is no easy feat.

WalterBright 8 days ago | root | parent |

> Yet, localizing 'print', etc. is no easy feat

True, but consider that "print" is just as easy to memorize its purpose as a squiggle.

I've lived in foreign countries, and traveled in countries where I don't speak the language at all. It doesn't take much to figure out what the words for "entry", "exit", "toilet", etc., mean.

And besides, English is the most international language in the world. Even if one doesn't know what "print" means, it's easy enough to look it up online or in a pocket dictionary. Keep in mind that there's no way to look up an icon.

xxs 7 days ago | root | parent |

>And besides, English is the most international language in the world

Yeah, it is - but it doesn't make it right. Say you have a Cyrillic (not only Russia uses it) interface with non-Cyrillic wording. It feels your country is a 2nd hand one (which is likely true but that's not the point). Again the easy to memorize part comes from the fact the native alphabet is Roman based.

I speak there languages but in some places I'd not figure "exit".

Again, I do prefer text labels/buttons - it's just something that doesn't translate well/universally.

teatro 9 days ago | prev | next |

Oof, I’m about to buy our new family car which has not a single knob anywhere, they all were replaced by those sensitive switches and sliders.

gaudystead 9 days ago | root | parent |

Consider looking at Mazda. They all seem to retain physical controls in addition to (optional) touch controls. Probably other brands out there too though.

flkiwi 9 days ago | prev | next |

I don’t think touchscreens were ever “in” except as a cost-saving measure by manufacturers, especially in the car space.

account42 9 days ago | root | parent |

Well yes, but they are very much "in" for exactly that reason in almost all appliances.

flkiwi 9 days ago | root | parent |

Depends if you’re looking at supply or demand side. I’ve been hesitating to look at a new stove because I’m terrified that I’ll find a bunch of capacitive touch buttons rather than proper knobs.

I think the difference with appliances, though, is that they’re rarely a matter of life and death, as compared to something like operating climate controls in a car at highway speeds.

jsemrau 9 days ago | prev | next |

I loved they keyboard of my Blackberry tbh. Why can't a future iPhone can have a slidable keyboard?

AzzyHN 9 days ago | prev | next |

Give me a big screen for music info, maps, settings, that kind of stuff. Give me buttons for everything else.

dredmorbius 9 days ago | root | parent |

Export all of that to a separate device which can be updated and/or replaced with time.

A friend was considering various auto options in the mid-aughts and described to me their realisation that the "navigation package" (a US$1500 option) would be an obsolete-on-delivery system that would only get worse with time. Its functionality has been provided by a series of ever-improving smartphones and tablets, not to mention published paper maps and highway atlases, which have excellent resolution, response, high- and low-light readability, and are utterly immune to networking glitches or WiFi deserts.

Music and/or podcasts can be delivered from your tablet or smartphone. Over local FM broadcast if no other options exist (and that's far less glitchy and frustrating than Bluetooth IME).

Gasp0de 9 days ago | prev | next |

No one can ever have believed that touchscreens are a good method of operating anything without looking at it.

tonymet 9 days ago | prev | next |

another factor is status. initially touchscreens were an exclusive option. Nowadays they are common and found on less expensive cars. only elite luxury cars stand out with copious tactile controls.

People will always pursue status indicators like a peacock's tail.

artursapek 9 days ago | prev | next |

One of the best things about 4runners is they never got rid of the oversized knobs and buttons :D

2075 8 days ago | prev | next |

it is about time to stop the cognitive decline through feedback loops introduced on swipe devices. but also e.g. automotive is a place where this stuff does not really help unless you get (finger) location based mechanical feedback :D

freedomben 9 days ago | prev | next |

This makes me happy for the future, but also kind of mad for the past and present. I've been loudly and strongly against touchscreen buttons since the very beginning because they were so clearly inferior in most ways. Of course there are some benefits like the ability to dynamically change the interface (which is a big deal), but for things like car radio, HVAC controls, refrigerator settings, basically anything that isn't a smartphone, they are clearly bad. I endured many, many years of people in tech (especially Apple fans) telling me that I was just stuck in the old way and resisting change, and largely dismissed my arguments rather than admit that maybe the "courageous" approach might actually be wrong. And of course, once Apple did it, everyone else started copying and jumping on the same design.

Regardless though, I'm really glad to hear that this is really happening. Ideally I hope that it causes some introspection and less confidence when "improving" designs in our industry, but given that's a human problem rather than a tech or company problem, I'm not expecting it.

Next up, I hope people start realizing that "smart" appliances are also a regression :-D

That concludes this episode of "old man yells at cloud." Thanks for listening.

i915 6 days ago | prev | next |

world is healing, who hasn't tried to use kodi remotes on their phone doesn't know life

OnlyMortal 9 days ago | prev | next |

In a car they’re a distraction from driving. You have to look at the iPad stuck to the dash and not on the road - where the driver’s focus must be.

With knobs and buttons, you can feel for them whilst still having your vision in the road.

This must make it safer to drive.

As a MX5 (ND) driver, even having a knob to scroll around the screen is a poor design choice. Touch would have been better (you can hack that) whilst driving but, frankly, this kind of car shouldn’t have a screen at all. It’s a driving car, not a home entertainment system.

elif 8 days ago | prev | next |

Boo. I really see this as a kitsch pseudo-luddite nostalgia trip more than a change in functional styles.

Appliances and cars can do this because they sell to adults.

In 20 years these knobs will be seen for the fad that it is.

andsoitis 9 days ago | prev | next |

Conspiracy by button manufacturers!

More seriously, there are tradeoffs either way. Physical knobs give great feedback, require less cognitive load, and remain fixed. The latter is also where touch screens shine - the UI can evolve over time.

In some settings touch screens are superior to physical buttons and in other scenarios it is the reverse.

Choose the right button for the job.

LocalH 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

> The latter is also where touch screens shine - the UI can evolve over time.

This is not necessarily a benefit. Such interfaces often break muscle memory when they change, often with no choice to the user. At least manufacturers can't come in when you have physical controls and suddenly replace your control panel without consent because they have a "better" one.

frde_me 9 days ago | root | parent |

Quite honestly, as long as the UX is _actually_ improving, I'm completely fine with having to adapt. I don't want to live in a world where things stay the same just because it's comfortable.

Having said that, at least 50% of the time that people change the experience, it makes it worst. So I agree that for companies that don't know how to design interfaces, this is maybe a benefit.

pdimitar 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

UI can evolve over time -- for appliances that need it. Almost none of them need it, and always always the "UI enhancements" are stuff nobody asked for, like 24/7 telemetry to servers that are gods know where.

No thanks.

Another commenter beat me to it but I'll just join him to reinforce their point: UI changes also break muscle which is something extremely important to have in a car and in your home appliances. People just don't enjoy relearning their own machines when they expect the job to be done with minimal cognitive overhead.

ctoth 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Why would I ever want my oven or stove to evolve over time?

xxr 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Cooks love the sense of pride and accomplishment they feel when they unlock new modes and temperatures, and they really go nuts over learning about exciting new products and services by the appliance’s partners in a way that is uniquely targeted to them /s

mmooss 9 days ago | root | parent |

I think some people would like that. The first would have to be an opt-in option, of course. I wouldn't like the latter, but most of the world isn't on HN and accept ads everywhere. An ad for the right bottle of wine to accompany the meal, etc., might be appreciated.

JadeNB 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> Choose the right button for the job.

I think that the problem comes with what the article mentions in the first paragraph—there are some places where UI might evolve with time, but my kitchen appliances, my washing machine, and much of my car are not places where I expect new UI paradigms, or want them if somebody dreams one up. Sure, the pendulum will eventually swing back again the other way to too much skeumorphism, but for now I'm going to push reflexively for physical buttons first, and ask questions later.

snapcaster 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Can you point to a single instance where the UI scheme for _an appliance_ was evolved over time in a way consumers like? I understand what you're saying is theoretically possible I just can't think of any instance in which it happened

parasubvert 9 days ago | root | parent |

TVs evolved from knobs on the device to buttons on a remote (or touchscreen).

Washing machines evolved from finicky one way turn relay knobs to tactile bidirectional digital knobs with buttons for options (like extra rinses, prewash, temperature, etc)

VCRs used to be so unusable they'd blink 12:00 because no one knew how to set the time. BluRay players and PVRs put everything on screen accessible via remote or mobile app.

Smart door locks make it very easy to lock/unlock a door via phone or watch vs futzing with keys that can be easily lost possibly requiring a new lock. Much better for guests or families.

Old dial or even digital thermostats were nearly impossible to properly schedule, modern digital thermostats use phones or websites, much easier (and also visualizes all your HVAC stats!)

Smart lights let you group lights together independent of power wiring, change colors, etc

Japanese in-seat toilet bidets with dashboards or remote are masterful compared to traditional bidets with faucets.

Single lever faucets vs separate dial faucets for hot/cold water

snapcaster 9 days ago | root | parent |

But those are all hardware changes right? besides the smart lock? Of course changing the hardware fundamentally will require a different UI but i meant for the same device

parasubvert 8 days ago | root | parent |

They're UI changes? Like I'm not entirely sure what you're arguing, any modern UI always involves some mix of hardware (physical controls and maybe a touchscreen) and software. My point is that the design space in the UI does evolve for the better in many cases.

A Nest thermostat for example which is a mix of screen, physical button and dial, is way more usable and feature rich than old school digital thermostats with buttons and monochrome LED displays.

BoingBoomTschak 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

>The latter is also where touch screens shine - the UI can evolve over time.

I think that also serves as a perverse incentive: no need to make it as perfect as possible the first time, you can always fix it later! Tech debt, coming to the controls of your moving 1~2 tons of metal, f yeah!

meindnoch 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Touchscreens are a viable alternative to buttons only if the system can react to touches within at most 500ms. We have enough evidence now to conclude that only Apple and Google engineers are capable of such an undertaking. Everyone else should stick to physical buttons.

lomase 9 days ago | root | parent |

For context I did development with a Teensy board and the library I was using for physical buttons claims to have 20 nanoseconds latency using the CPU interrupts.

croisillon 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

building kitchen appliances has been an incredible journey but we will be sunsetting all your appliances within 30 days, thanks for believing in us!

__MatrixMan__ 9 days ago | prev | next |

While we're at it, let's come up with a tactile way to connect wireless things. I'm so tired of hunting down all of my devices and disabling Bluetooth just so that when I turn on my headphones they connect to the appropriate device.

I'd love to just touch the two things together and hear a beep to know they're paired.

Eavolution 9 days ago | root | parent |

That's actually how my headphones (sony 1000xm3 I think they are) can be paired, there's an nfc chip on one of the sides which if you tap your phone to will turn on bluetooth, turn on the headphones, connect, and the headphones will beep and say bluetooth connected. It's the most seamless wireless connection I've had with bluetooth

bool3max 9 days ago | prev | next |

Touchscreens certainly have their place, for example in general purpose devices such as smartphones, but the idiotic cost-saving movement of putting them anywhere and everywhere as replacements of traditional, well-designed interfaces such as those in vehicles is absurd.

surgical_fire 9 days ago | prev | next |

I wish this was true for cellphones as well.

add-sub-mul-div 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

My Treo with a physical keyboard was the last mobile device I had that typing wasn't a chore with. Touch screen primacy has turned mobile devices from content creation to content consumption devices.

frde_me 9 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

I disagree with this. The touchscreen on my phone allows for so much versatile applications than is possible with physical buttons.

I really don't miss the days where applications had to retrofit their controls onto a fixed physical setting.

Sure, maybe for dialling a phone number or texting it was better. But for everything else I do on a phone, give me a touchscreen.

Reason077 9 days ago | root | parent | prev |

If physical keys were the way to go in smartphones, we’d all still be using BlackBerrys. If it’s a dumbphone you want, there’s plenty of models available with physical keys.

balls187 9 days ago | prev | next |

Worst aspect of the 2023 vw id4 is the capacitive touch controls.

I like the swipe to raise volume and temp, but the mirror and window controls are atrocious.

Side note: having window lock and child safety lock be a single control is a huge miss.

rsynnott 9 days ago | prev | next |

> Plotnick, an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.

The second-best button expert is currently infuriated at missing out on their time to shine, presumably.

(I’m fascinated by what their metric is, here. Like, most-cited or something? She has, indeed, written a good few papers about buttons. Or just the one that everyone in the field says is the top button authority?)

Netcob 9 days ago | prev | next |

Yes please. I am currently driving a pre-touchscreen car and I hope I can just skip that era entirely.

Touchscreens are a menace. The most dangerous moments I have in my car are when I'm trying to skip the ads in my podcasts. Which got way worse since google removed default media buttons from maps. I bet that decision has an actual body count.

Yizahi 9 days ago | prev | next |

I remember Volkswagen execs saying this a few years ago and promising to revert touch controls in cars in next gen. Guess what, it's still shitty touch controls in the recent EVs.

AcerbicZero 8 days ago | prev | next |

What a lovely facepalm moment; anyone whos driven a car in the last decade could have told them this.

alejohausner 9 days ago | prev | next |

What I really would like to see is a car with a full command-line interface with a qwerty keyboard built into the steering wheel. Then you could type

  > setgear r ENTER
To put the car in reverse. Of course people on hn could just abbreviate that to

  > r ENTER
using a ksh macro! But for newbie users we could have a 3 button mouse instead.

/s

cheesycod 9 days ago | root | parent | next |

You joke but there actually may be merit to it. Of course, you'd still need a GUI on top but you technically could put a full command-line interface with limited commands and actually sell it as a differentiating feature at this point.

JJMcJ 8 days ago | root | parent |

For a time there were automatic transmission cars with push buttons. I think it was a 1950s/60s Great Idea. If I remember you had to reach around the steering wheel to access them.

Never used one but it fell out of favor.