Playing games can hardly have any consequences, but driving does. All those buttons/knobs are designed to minimize the chance you have to look for something.
Virtual keys somehow alleviate a little bit as there are reduced physical keys but still, you will probably have to press multiple buttons to do one single task.
Your argument doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you do any of that WHILE DRIVING?? That’s both dangerous and foolish.
As for key presses to navigate a menu you would be surprised how quickly a human memorized exactly how many times to press what buttons to get to where they want to go. In my current car I know that if I press Home, down x3, and OK I will end up in the Media menu. I can do all this without taking mu eyes off the road (or even thinking about it much after a year+ with this vehicle.
After a few weeks of using any car I owned I basically stopped needing to look at the buttons. Even when there's a row of 4-5 identical physical buttons I just run my fingers across the row, this is where muscle memory comes in (like blind typing). The huge advantage being I can touch every button without triggering the function until I press.
I mean I'm not against huge screens in the car, as long as I can turn them off or dim them to the point where I consider they don't impede my driving. But I'd still very much like to see basic functions of the car tied (also?) to physical buttons. Whether the manufacturer also wants to put them on a screen that's fine but I see no good reason a handful or buttons and knobs can't fit in a car. The minor savings or the wow effect don't really offset the downsides of distracting attention.
I have a car with many buttons[0] and a car with few buttons[1]. I'd take the few button one every time.
While my few button car doesn't have many buttons, all to the critical to driving inputs have physical controls. Lights, wipers, defrosters, volume, etc is all on or immediately around the wheel.
Meanwhile, on my many button car, sure there's a button for most things this car can do. But almost all those buttons in the middle never get pressed. They're essentially a waste of space. And most of them, even if I were to press them I wouldn't be doing so while the car is in motion. I shouldn't be messing with the navigation system while the car is in motion. I shouldn't be flipping through folders on the mp3 CD or flash drive. I shouldn't be messing with the phone functions, I shouldn't be messing with the Blue link stuff, etc.
Having all those buttons aren't a positive while driving, they're a negative. They make the map I do use while driving much smaller. And when stopped, they make the Android Auto interface I interact with much smaller and overall worse.
Don't get me wrong, some manufacturers have gone way overboard and put things like glove compartments and AC vents and shifters on a screen or eliminated the stalks. There should be a balance for sure, but having a screen in a car is nice.
> Physical buttons cleanly resolve all of these major problems.
It depends on how the physical button works. You functionally don't get tactile feedback if the response time isn't good. You don't actually always know that you've activated a control (e.g. Did I not press it hard enough? Did I need to rotate it further?) Cheap buttons or knobs or dials can often feel mushy and be unclear as to whether you've fully turned them or pushed them.
Not taking eyes off the road is definitely better, but general distraction is still a problem even if you don't have to look away.
I take it you're in favor of the rumored glass keyboards coming out soon in laptops. I'm not.
Physical buttons are key when operating a vehicle IMO. Furthermore, I'd prefer big ass buttons and knobs so that there is as little reason as possible for people to take their eyes off the road.
But you only learn the interface once (and that doesn't have to happen while driving, either); then you use it again and again. So I would argue making it slightly harder to learn, but better to use in the long run (in the cases where you cannot have it both ways), makes the difference between a tool built to last, and a product made to sell.
Then there is the fact that if you only have one knob, you still have to learn how to put it in the mode you want (via secondary buttons, or even worse, just one you have to keep pressing); you gained nothing.
Also, compare typing an a cell phone "keyboard" and a PC keyboard. While you wouldn't want to have a single button for every little function (like upper-case letters), it generally makes for better usability to have a dedicated button for most of them, because while I press one key, my other fingers can already get into position to press the next in sequence.
So I like physical controls too but I'm thinking of my current car that has them and I'm sure that I end up looking at them when I use them. If it doesn't involve digging around in menus then it's probably about the same, distraction-wise.
Can you explain how buttons are a distraction? Also, by “distracting”, do you mean that the present of physical knobs prevent you from paying attention to the road?
I like tactile buttons when I'm focusing on the road. Looking away from the road to see if I have my finger in the correct place on a screen is much more costly from an attention standpoint.
I thought this was obvious. Why are we stating it?
Here's where things can get interesting. If you've ever used a fancy audio mixer before, they pack a lot of features into a board with a few buttons and sliders. Cars can do similarly with controls for rolling, sliding, and pressing but dynamically adjust based on what's on the display.
I'll admit I'm being a bit obtuse, but overall if you're wanting to argue its a safety thing to have knobs then in reality its even more of a safety thing to encourage the auto controls over having a bunch of buttons and knobs to fiddle with and get distracted by. What's more distracting, taking your hands off the wheel and turning a knob or just having the auto climate control take care of it?
To me, I'd rather not waste large swaths of the dashboard with buttons and knobs I'd never press compared to having it be actually useful like navigation information. Its easier to quickly glance at a map and get useful information from it when the information is bigger than when its smaller.
Literally half of the buttons on the dashboard of one of my car never get pressed. Its wasted space. Meanwhile almost all of the screen on my big screen car gets used every time I drive.
You can take your eyes of the road for a little bit my man. You do it all the time anyway when checking mirrors. Yes, knobs and sliders would be better but this is a good compromise vs exclusive screens.
Also, as per the other content: you can type and remember 100+ buttons.
Physical buttons are far, far better than touch buttons when you're driving. Keep your eyes on the road, use tactile sense to figure out the button to press, once you've learned where it is.
I hate clicky keyboards, because there's usually a pretty quick on-screen result from hitting the button, and you might press keys tens of thousands of times in a day. Love me some tactile.
But in a car when you might interact with controls a couple dozen times per trip? Absolutely clicky.
But the important different IMHO is that a knob / buttons don't require you to take your eyes off the road. In that 1 second you look down, you could cause an accident due to inattention.
On the flipside, a lot of systems that you would touch during driving - lights, heating, radio - have been automated, so there's less of a need to fiddle with this while driving as well.
Soft buttons aren't terrible. F-keys are an example where the same button could mean different things in different contexts, but they're tactile. Or if you had a Ti-85 (or 86), it had soft f1-5 and was a lot more flexible than the Ti-82 which had hard function keys. You could get muscle memory of entering menus and using the f keys that would be presented. Of course, hopefully a car doesn't have quite so deep of a menu tree.
If buttons are too expensive and you want to reduce the count, if I press radio and then F1, that could be radio preset 1, and if I press fan and then F1, that turns the fan speed to 1 of 6 (which could be off, I don't really care), that would be fine, and then you don't need quite so many buttons. Otoh, if I'm paying $20k or more for a car, you can afford some buttons.
How many cars have you driven? The whole point here is to design the UI thoughtfully. Yes, there are cars with confusing buttons and knobs, but a touch screen is worse, not better. There is no way to develop muscle memory for pushing spots on a touch screen especially when there might be a modal dialog or if a software update has “improved” the layout of functions.
Physical buttons and knobs and switches that don’t move can be learned by muscle memory alone, and even the ones you need to look down for, that takes an order of magnitude less time and concentration to deal with a physical switch over a digital icon.
There are plenty of features that are fine to be behind a touchscreen, but there are some that just need to be physical buttons. If they are on the steering wheel that counts! But I have never seen HVAC or defrost controls on the steering wheel. And most of what I see these days are soft switches and buttons that require looking at a screen to interpret, which is again, worse.
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