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Death of the Button? Analog vs. Digital
mattnyc99 writes "Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds is sick of navigating menus to turn up the heat—while he's trying to drive. His take in the article (as well as a a no-holds-barred podcast) is that modern tech product designers should get back to analog controls before iPhone users get sick of looking down at their touchscreen everytime they dial without a dial. It may be up to you: Whither dangerous auto technology, or long live the touchscreen?"
The author complains about BMW's idrive control (more info here), but I think it is a good solution to this problem. It's a universal control that gives you a tactile interface without tons of buttons and knobs. Once you get used to it, it's actually pretty easy to use.
The problem with analog controls is that you can't add/remove them easily once a device is made. BMW, for example, updates the software in their vehicles periodically, adding and removing features. Without some sort of universal control system this is much more difficult to do.
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What's really needed to solve this dilemma (dialing-while-driving issues in general aside) is a technology which will allow software to subtly deform a touch screen to give tactile feedback. So buttons actually stand out from the screen a bit, etc. I seem to recall there being a technology like this in one of the later of Asimov's Foundation books (Foundation's Edge of Foundation and Earth, I don't recall which): the main character had an inclined, desk-like board on his ship which was a tactile touch screen. I imagine some combination of flexible (and probably elastic) LCDs and something like those toy pinboards (where you've got thousands of tiny dull metal pins arrayed on a board, and you can make impressions of your face and whatnot in them) could accomplish this. The hard part would be controlling all those tiny pins electronically; making the LCD elastic enough to keep snug to the contours of the pinboard would probably also be tough. But imagine the possibilities! You could actually feel the smooth, round curves of... er... those shiny Aqua buttons in OSX.... yeah, that's it. Though other possibilities may help popularize it faster. :-)
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Seriously. The guy is a disturbed political nut job on par with Ann Coulter and knows nothing about technolgy other than he has a blog which only he's allowed to post on and pretty much nobody reads. This idiot was and still is a huge War Supporter. Frankly most people are sick of Glenn Reynolds, the Right Wing's Ward Churchill.
Maybe thats true, bit in this case (and I speak as a bleeding-heart pinko leftie) the guy is right. Designers seem to think that because thay can put a computer in it, it has to *be* a computer. I want analogue. Oh, and before anyone makes any luddite assertions, I'm a shit hot programmer who can juggle a 296,077 line (according to slocount) program in his head with ease. Technology belongs in its place and nowhere else.
When I said BMW upgraded their software I meant _after_ you buy the car. They're not going to install a new console every time they upgrade the software while servicing your vehicle. All I'm saying is that there is little point in having a programmable computer without some sort of universal input device attached. It can be analog, or tactile, or whatever you want to call it, as long as it's adaptable.
While the iPod UI is very good, it's a poor comparison. The iPod is a special purpose device only needs to do one thing.
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That's true. I recently bought a cheap radio. I was surprised that even though it had an analogue tuning knob, it had a digital frequency display. Presumably LCDs and chips can be made so cheaply that a sliding plastic indicator actually involves a significant increase in the cost.
Yes. Cameras controls are a real problem these days. It's partly an issue of trying to be all things to all people. You want it fully automatic? Sure. You want to set everything yourself? Can do that too. Or try "sports mode" or "night mode" or "fashion mode" or "crowd mode" or "jewel mode" or "monkey mode". Okay, I made that last one up.
Pre-digital photographers had at minimum a basic understanding of film speed, depth of field, aperture size, and shutter speed. If you knew these four things, you could take any SLR manufactured before 1990 and use it immediately. Now, every camera has to be figured out. Every camera has a different interface. And I'm talking about the point and shoots.
The worst thing is when they are in some useless "mode" like "sepia/old fashioned" or "birthday candle" and you are missing a great shot because you can't figure out how to turn it off.
Rant. Rant. Rant. Young whippersnappers. Etc.
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On a similar vein, I sure wish DVD player makers like Sony would put all of the controls on the console as well as the remote. I hate the fact that losing the remote means only being able to play, stop, or eject.
It's not a tough interface design problem.
Heck, you can probably make an 80/20 rule for it:
1) 80% of the time, users are interacting on 20% of the function.
Come to think of it, it's simpler than that:
2) 80% of the time, users want one of four functions. Oh yeah, and might as well throw in
3) with a button interface, users can "spatially remember" three distinct buttons without looking (or training).
and
4) with a dial, that "spatial memory" becomes 5 discrete positions, and a whole mess of sweet intension/remission levels (=volume, tuning have much higher response times).
So design-wise, you want 5 dials maximum. Of those dials, four are fixed in function, and one changes the paradigm (and presumably some of the other dials' function). The main things anyone would want to do are there, and they're there at the first level.
If you wanted to have a similar arrangement with keys, you'd need between 10 and 25 keys. It would not make sense.
I have a 325i with an iDrive, and I can tell you exactly what is wrong with the damned thing.
(1) Inconsistent user interface 'language'. In some submenus, selecting a submenu requires rotating the knob; in others, it requires moving the knob like a joystick. (Worse, in some screens, such as on the main navigation screen, you need both motions to select from different menus and submenus. The inconsistency extends to the language of moving back one level: do you press the menu button to pop up one level (as in the 'Info' menu) or do you push the knob forward and select the "up" arrow? Or do you rotate the knob to select the "up" arrow?
Because there is no consistant user interface, it is impossible to simply press the right button to do the task--and that requires you to actually look at the screen, divine from the layout of the screen what action (push menu key, push knob forward, rotate knob) that you need to perform, then take that action--all the time while driving 70 miles an hour down a busy freeway.
(2) Overuse of the knob electromagnetic stopper for tactile feedback causes the knob to be extremely hard to use.
The iDrive knob uses an electromagnet system to both give the knob the feel of discrete "steps" (by triggering an electromagnet briefly as you turn it, to make it feel like there are descrete steps), or to emulate a hard 'stop' when you hit the top or the bottom of a menu list. While this works fairly well for short menus, in some places (notably in the iDrive / iPod interface menus), the 'stop' electromagnet pull is not done when you hit the end of the list, but when you hit the bottom of the screen. So when you rotate the knob to the bottom of the screen, rather than just one brief click and the list scrolls up, the knob does a full stop, then a physical (electromagnetically driven) 'bump', then returns to the same orientation while the screen scrolls up one.
What this means is that if you have a list of 30 or 40 musicians, instead of just turning the knob, you wind up holding the knob as the thing flutters under your hand (hurting your wrist) as the list scrolls up.
I think BMW overused this electromagnet because they had this "wow, we are paying a few bucks for the hardware; let's overuse the feature because it's so cool" thing that many programmers get--and what could have been a subtle effect is instead used to clobber you literally in the wrist until your wrist is sore.
The iDrive user interface actually has more controls than the iPod: a knob rotates back and forth, has four different directions it can be pushed (similar to the four control buttons on the iPod), a select (push the knob down), and a 'menu' button. (I don't count the voice control button, even though it is physically part of the same cluster of buttons, as it does something completely different.) Yet even with one more button, the iDrive is much harder to use than an iPod--because whomever wrote the software didn't think about useability.
It is the dumbest thing in the world to have a $40K car where every last detail is well thought, the driving dynamics are incredible, and the whole thing is so incredibly well built--only to have a user interface that looks like a college student's freshman programming project.
There is part of me that is so annoyed with the user interface that I'm half tempted to move to Germany just so I can fix the stupid thing. Hell, they don't even have to swap out the underlying OS (Windows Automotive), even though it means the car's iDrive (and radio and nav system and...) are effectively dead for the first 30 seconds after starting the car because the OS is still booting. Just clean up the user interface, and it would make a whole world of difference. (And I even know WinCE, on which Windows Automotive is based, so it's not like I couldn't hack the damned thing myself.)
Obviously the safety of a complex system like an entire transportation system depends on many factors - it's to be expected that some changes which occured are detrimental, while others are beneficial. Analysing the overall performance of the system can not directly be used to determine which factors are detrimental - it can only show that the detrimental changes (I think we can safely assume that there are some) are cancelled out by the effects of the beneficial changes.
Given that, suggesting a return to 50 year old technology as the article suggests, is almost certainly the wrong thing to do. The whole approach of coming up with wild theories, based on nothing but gut feelings is not only non-scientific - it's dangerous. Mr Leno has not the slightest idea whether any of his suggestions and speculations have a connection with reality. It's not even based on anecdotical evidence - it's based on anecdotical gut feelings. This is the sort of nonsense which causes some people to reject airbags and ABS.
Mr Leno if you advise people on matters of live and death, is it so much to ask that you learn something about the subject? Or alternatively keep quiet on topics you don't know anything about?
Disclaimer: I develop chips for automotive applications (e.g. airbag controllers). However my salary does not depend on anything my company sells (actually, unfortunately it doesn't even depend on my performance - I'm an engineer...). Anyway, if you are really concerned about your safety your best bet is public transport.
http://www.parablog.com/blog/images/computer2004.j pg
I gave up on aftermarket car stereos and just get whatever top end factory system is offered. The tiny buttons and Vegasesque displays were just getting too stupid.
Which would you prefer to set a preset station:
Factory stereo: Tune to station. Hold down preset button until beep is heard. Afterward, just hit that button to get that station.
Aftermarket: Run through a sequence of button pushes similar to that required to surface a submarine, and target and launch a cruise missile. Afterward, no less than three presses of tiny buttons are required to access your "convenient" preset.
I'm serious, too. I had onee once where it took more button presses to go to a station preset than to just tune the radio manually. There should be hard jail time given for interface abominations on that level.
Sometimes I would wonder if the Japanese engineers outsourced their interface design to institutions for psychotics.