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A New Car UI
An anonymous reader writes "As our cars have become more complex, so have the user interfaces with which we control them. Using the current crop of infotainment systems embedded in a car's dash is byzantine and frustrating. UI designer Matthaeus Krenn has put up a post demonstrating his efforts to reinvent in-car UIs in a way that doesn't force people to squint at tiny buttons, instead leaving more of their attention for the road. It's based on using a touch-screen display that realigns the interface to wherever you put your fingers down. It also reacts differently depending on how many fingers you use to touch the screen."
Seriously, any time a "UI designer" sits down to re-invent something, the result is inevitably terrible. They focus on whatever new-age idea they have is, and often completely miss the core problem while coming up with some genius solution to a minor one.
My uneducated and rather simple view of how to do it:
- Physical buttons for the stuff you might/can safely touch while driving (basic stereo controls, temperature controls, wiper settings, etc)
- Knobs with fixed ranges for things like temperature (so you can set them without looking). Stuff like volume can be infinite as adjustments are immediately noticeable while adjusting.
- Displays that you can quickly glance at, preferably without having to look down too much (I’m a huge fan of the multi-level dash Honda put in their civic).
- Stuff you will be adjusting while stopped or maybe at a red light can be whatever you want.. fancy touchscreen, display in a weird spot, who cares.
Much as I don’t normally lean in the nancy-state direction, I actually wish these complex touchscreen interfaces were disabled while driving. It just seems like a ridiculous safety concern (and yes I know the passenger could adjust it while you safely drive). Honestly I don’t care if someone is playing with one and smashes themselves into a highway divider, but I don’t want someone smashing into _me_ because they are trying to figure out why their cloud streaming music feed dealie isn’t working.
This is not a car UI. It is a UI for the car's entertainment system.
The car's UI is still a steering wheel and throttle/brake pedals.
Design a big, friendly, easy to use, uncluttered interface.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
But this wouldn't be an issue if we just used good old fashioned buttons...
The reason current car controls work so well is that you don't have to look at them. You build up muscle memory and can simply reach out and adjust the volume or switch to a different radio station. A touch screen you have to look at is a massive downgrade and far more dangerous.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Whenever I hear the term "muscle memory" it reminds me of learning to play a musical instrument
That thing looks as baffling and intimidating as a saxophone to a new user
Sure..once you learn it, it might be cool, but how many people have the physical talent and time to learn it
I tried for years to learn piano, practiced a lot, and just never could get it
The thing about real knobs is that they are all directly available at any time and they don't change their location and meaning. Like most virtual knobs in "touch" interfaces do (depending on screen/context).
If you want to do that with a touch screen (i.e. have fixed position / meaning knobs), then you'll realize you could as well implement it with hardware knobs, as the touch screen is as useful an ashtray on a motorcycle.
In addition to all this, a traditional knob can be used with wet / gloved hands too.
Just make voice control actually usable or, if on a tight budget, buy one of the many fine automobiles that have knobs you can use by touch and muscle memory.
Try to use a damn touch screen without looking. There is a reason to why there are real buttons in a car: haptic feedback tells you what you are doing..
(there's a subject that wrote itself).
I don't like the interface for a number of reasons, but a big one is that eight separate controls is not very many at all. In that same giant space you could have put in eight physical sliders and had exactly the same benefits!
But also I do not like the design, because I don't think it does something they promise it can do - keep your eyes off the screen. For less commonly used commands I'd always be forgetting how many figures to use, or if it was pinching style or sweeping style. And even if you did remember you'd have to look at the screen to make sure it hadn't accidentally got the wrong version of your touch.
Basically I think you'd be better off with a touchscreen that had track-pad like areas where you could swipe up/down to change settings. Swipe gestures inherently do not care where you start from either, but with a real screen you can have more than eight things you can adjust.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Lets list the controls are used quite regularly
volume
source
tuning
playlist
preset selection
temperature
vent distribution
AC
fan speed
re circulation
window defrost
rear wipers/washer
That's 13. Add in phone and/or gps interface and you get even more.
Then there is the issue of remembering what gesture means what and the difficulty of gestures when wearing gloves.
The idea needs work
(BTW, anyone notice the reference to the very old sitcom?)
I don't recall the car make or model. It belonged to a friend of mine so I can ask him if you really want to know. The controls for the radio were mounted on the steering column, in which a way that he could hold the wheel securely, and steer with both hands, while adjusting the radio. The best music player UI I've ever personally seen was in my first-gen iPad. Too bad I sold it when I was broke and hungry. Someday I will buy a new iPad, but if apple has "improved" it then surely I will hurl my new iPad off the golden gate bridge. The very worst UI for a music player I've ever seen was in my iPhone 4, when held in landscape mode. When held in Portrait mode it was a good UI design for the Portrait mode of such a small screen. But when rotated to landscape, rather than laying out the familiar, helpful UI in a broader, shorter way, it changed entirely to something that made no sense to me. What absolutely drove me berserk was that most of Apple's own Apps would not permit Landscape text entry. I'm a big guy. I have big fingers, and I'm old so I don't see so well. Using the on-screen keyboard on an iPhone in portrait mode makes me want to hurl it into the sea as well.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
One thing Windows 8, newer google maps with chrome, newer YouTube, office 2013, gnome 3, and some will say Windows 7, is change is almost universally bad!
If it ain't broke don't fix it!
Art professors have no business mucketing around with design. I hate the new touch, little to no color, All CAPS, flat, one criteria based (only consumption, or road focused), and no detail to anything else
http://saveie6.com/
My interface is better because I allow user to use 6 fingers!
My invention is a knob. Grab it with two fingers - volume control, grab it with three fingers - change station, grab it with four...and so on. For extra function you can pull the knob out or push it in.
I've actually been wanting to take a stab at teaching piano, so I could practice on you, even if remotely. The best teacher I ever had was Angela Bonilla of Vancouver, British Columbia. She is from Colombia, and has a master's in concert piano from the conservatory in versailles, france so she is no slouch. Most piano teachers have very set methods. For example one teacher I had was very fixated on how I should learn certain specific songs from certain specific lesson books. Those books are admittedly good books, but there are certain songs that I could just never learn how to play, which frustrated both of us. But Angela would observe what specific problems I had, then on the spot would come up with very simple exercises that, when I practiced them, would solve those specific problems. Each time I tried to learn a new song she would observe new problems, then develop new exercises. That is how I would teach you. It is very uncommon for teachers of any sort to do something like that. But yes, muscle memory is how one learns many things. I understand that it is actually straightforward to learn how to shred on a guitar, it just takes a lot of time and patience. My piano compositions. All creative commons and the sheet music to two of them. It would be very easy for you to play "Emergence". "Recursion" is easier than it looks.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Please tell me the browser cache is screwing with me. Please tell me that my wife wants to have sex more often ( ok that isn't going to happen, I have a 12 and 15 year old) Do we really have Slashdot.org back?
While touch screens are costly, the parts count to the manufacturer of the end product is just the screen, a ribbon cable and a couple connectors. The complexity is in the software, but there is no per-unit cost for that. The grossly offensive on-screen UIs we see these days has a lot to do with electronics manufacturers not having to "BOM" - "Bill of Materials" - a twisty maze of little parts all alike. It also simplifies assembly and packaging, if there are few or no buttons. Then they try to sell us on how not having buttons makes us happier, when in reality they just don't want to face the very real possibility, as actually happened to Apple Computer when I worked there in the mid-90s, that there is a sudden product shortage of an otherwise hot-selling product, because Apple's supplier of some manner of arcane kind of screw - yes really, the kind of connector you install with a screwdriver :O - ran totally out of them.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
This.
Have gnu, will travel.
Touch screens. There's your problem. They are a very poor choice for an interface in an environment where you can't devote 100% of your eyesight to it.
Auto makers seem to make a virtue out of having touch screens for everything a the moment just for the sake of using a touch screen, whereas what they should be doing is using the most appropriate interface to promote safety and clarity. To my mind that's distinct, physical buttons without too much function overloading. In other words, exactly what we had until the 90s.
-t you ran the light?" "I fliped the turn signal both ways then hit the horn once. When I applied the brakes after that, rather than stopping, a high-fidelity audio recording of some Slashdot shouted out 'Hi Mom'" I was for a rather similar reason assigned the special duty of ensuring that no more easter eggs were ever planted in Medior's CD-ROMs ever again. Our best client ever got the idea that our first deliverable would be a production run of 250,000 home shopping catalog CDs, Just In Time For Christmas. Perhaps you can see where I am going here.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
Sorry, but if you're still focusing on hand-based UIs in cars, you're doin' it wrong.
Voice command is where it's at. Distracted driving is illegal in almost every state.
What could possibly go wrong when I remove my concentration from the road ahead and try to use a device that malfunctions when I eat chips or fries?
It's like they don't GET Americans.
Really.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The UI absolutely MUST refresh/respond/update quickly - in fact, instantly. No matter what.
Driver takes eyes off the road to find soft-button on touchscreen.
Driver looks back at the road and continues driving.
Cheapo CPU takes 1-10 seconds to register the touch event, process, and update the screen. Possibly longer if device is running "value add" software (adware from manufacturers trying to sell software-as-a-service, (like OnStar or other bullshit) on the car), possibly longer if request relies on data that can't be retrieved without latency issues, etc.
Driver keeps looking down every 2 seconds to see if there was a response, whether it was valid, whether he touched the right button, whether he's got network connectivity, is this thing even on? CRASH.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I used to hate interfaces designed by programmers and engineer. Oh how I once thought that they should let designers design the interfaces. Then, we handed the interface design to 'uix' "experts" and now we have the same level of incomprehensible bullshit. It just looks prettier.
If car UI want people watch it, take careful watching that is very dangerous.
Not a digital entertainment center on wheels.
Does anyone sell a *real* car now?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
people will have to look at it.
Touch UI for cars is a bad idea. Dangerous, and will break cross model and manufacture consistency.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
BTW, anyone notice the reference to the very old sitcom?
It seems we both had a great idea about the same time.
But, I think you should have spelled out eight to make the reference closer.
I admire the list you put together, I was going to do the same list but just didn't have the motivation to list it all out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
in a car, while driving... touch screen bad, buttons good. Having to look at the screen to see what your doing, while driving, bad. having tactile feedback, good. New isn't always better.
Good example: Ford's implementation of MyTouch has the more complex controls on the touch screen; but, still implements knobs and buttons for the basic entertainment system and climate controls. They did the right thing here.
Bad Example: Ford implemented PowerShift manual mode by putting a rocker switch on the side of the shifter... For someone who's been driving for 30 years that's just not intuitive; and, speaking as an engineer, it's a poor choice from the human factors perspective.
This is ridiculous! You mean now I have to learn and think about how many fingers do I use to control control X and do they need to be far apart or not?!?
It's simple, just make the current buttons bigger for the kinds of adjustments you are likely to make when driving. All too often toggles and play/pause, etc are small buttons to look appealing instead of large buttons because they are likely to be used frequently. Usage of screen real estate often sucks big time. For example, in my car, when the bluetooth is paused I get a small button to make it play again. It takes up about 10% on the right hand side of the screen. The other 90% is completely fucking blank! Put the damn play button in the center of the screen and make it fucking big. It's the most likely thing I'm gonna hit next! Geeze! This is really not rocket science - common sense is all one needs.
"U.S. Expected to Seek Limits on Car Touchscreens"
http://www.insurancejournal.co...
and about time, i dont want to be in the car that idiot drivers hit, especially when their insurance company drops the coverage and leaves it to the lawyers.
Cars and trucks and motorcycles bounce . Plus, we can't always be looking. See, so we can't always control where we're touching it; we can't even always control how many fingers we put down.
We need to be able to talk to these systems. My Garmin GPS does this. I don't have to touch it. I say "voice command" and off we go. No touching. Bouncing doesn't matter. I don't have to look.
Until you get to this level of interface, you're doing it wrong, and furthermore, as of this point in time, you're also behind the curve, because others are doing it right.
Thanks for this, slashdot, just this morning I was cursing at a touch interface in my vehicle.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This is not intuitive at all. The great thing about the traditional UI is that you can in general figure out how to use it without extensive research. Each button and knob corresponds to one action and are labeled. With this UI, there's no way you can just pick it up and go. All the actions are hidden from the user.
Coffee. Fingerprints. Greasy French Fry prints. Rather use my hand to drive the vehicle. Hold hands with my lady.
Also, that Garmin GPS? Talks to my phone by bluetooth. Don't have to touch or look at my phone, either.
Touchscreens totally suck. Everywhere. No exceptions. Even the iPad, best touchscreen ever, sucks. Still fingerprints. Still uses completely opaque "gestures" to do things I have no idea I was "asking" for. Requires looking. But you know what? I can TALK to my iPad. Writing's on the wall, vehicle makers. Speech is it, period, end of story, get on that, dammit.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Car's entertainment system?
As a driver, my focus should be on the road not being entertained! (Put down the cell phone and drive you stupid #^%*@!!!)
As a passenger... $25 for a Raspberry Pi. RaspBMC is free. It plays mpeg4 files just fine, high-def or standard-def, recorded off mythtv and a hauppauge HD-PVR. (Or downloaded from youtube with that firefox add-on, in mpeg4 format so they play without transcoding.) Car USB power adapters are available in the checkout impulse buy area of my local hardware store. 10-amp car cigarette-lighter 3-way splitters are available at pep-boys. Headrest-mounted DVD players (that can handle output from a Raspberry Pi) are available in the automotive section of Walmart. (Caveat: 720x240 resolution, half standard-def (NTSC).) Cables from Monoprice. Wireless keyboards and mice from whatever slickdeals has listed today. A couple of usb-sticks and you can give every passenger their own DVR with hundreds of hours of programming. Expensive? Perhaps, when you add all these little parts up. But compared to the $3k they wanted for a simple DVD player in my last car, it's pennies on the dollar! And feature-wise, there is no comparison. One DVD for all the kids with unskipable advertisements where you need to change the disk every 20 minutes vs each kid gets their own full-featured DVR completely under their own control (wireless mouse/keyboard) with hundreds of hours of their favorite programs to choose from?
Just don't forget the headphones!!! That's not a mistake I'll feel the need to repeat again anytime soon...
Jesus. How do these car companies stay in business selling such overpriced utter crap!
You don't need all that fancy shit.
You need to be able to get from a to b. You need heating for the winter and cooling for the summer.
That is it. No "entertainment systems" no dvd players.
A radio for emergency weather updates is nice.
You want something for you kids to do? Get them an ipad. That way it's not stuck in the car forever, where it will be obsolete long before you get rid of the car.
You want to watch a movie while driving? Get off the fucking road.
True story from a friend who worked in a airplane company. They were designing the UI for a helicopter. The first mock-up was by a bunch of nerdy engineers, who designed a matrix of 64 buttons, arranged in a 8 x 8 matrix, each with a word printed on it and lit from below. The called the test pilot. He took one look at it, then got up wordlessly and rummaged around the conference room till he found a some stiff card board (a three ring binder or a clip board). In all seriousness he said, "cut this cardboard to fit exactly on top of those buttons and paint it black and cover it completely" and walked out.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If a standard touch interface (like those shown at the beginning of the video) only had 8 controls, they'd be easy to use without looking as well. This is just another flashing interface that works great for a small number of controls but quickly degenerates into chaos when you try to control the number of systems and settings a REAL car interface has to deal with.
A car UI should be usable without looking at it. That's why physical buttons and dials of different sizes and shapes with satisfying tactile feedback are the gold standard. Touchscreens should be limited to interaction while parked, such as setting up your sat nav.
Honestly this is a major fail waiting to happen. their examples all require you to look at it. Give me a UI that does not need any attention at all or better yet zero eye use.
Oh right, that's a volume KNOB. They work 800X better than even hardware buttons.
Want a decent Car UI? VOICE CONTROL. make it reliable and make it work. a single button on the steering wheel for me to hit, the stereo drops in volume by 80 db and I get a boop tone. I say what I want and it does it. Volume control are the other two buttons on the steering wheel with a 4th.... MUTE.
4 buttons and voice control with 100% voice feedback. THAT is a winning car UI, not some art project.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
>Cars and trucks and motorcycles bounce .
Your touch will never be off: As your fingers touch the screen, the desired control moves in place to always be at your fingertips.
We have joysticks, knobs, buttons, sliders, switches, touch and voice.
They're never as good in combinations of two-plus as they are alone.
On/Off, Temperature gradient, frequency equalizer, balance/fade; all better with physical controls. Why? To employ the same method used to memorize random facts. Simple location association.
Memorizing a sequence of button presses, knob twists, etc. is *doable*, but it's not *best*.
I've Developed a car UI using a MS Kinnect. When I raise my middle finger the horn sounds, Grabbing my crotch turns on the windscreen wipers and I can change the radio station by picking my nose. I changed the ass scratching seat warmer signal as it sometimes accidentally turned on the wipers. Of course any work of genius takes time to perfect.
I was just looking at the latest Civic, which has a touchscreen in the middle of the dash. It looked OK, until I thought... 'hang on, how am I supposed to use that while wearing gloves when it's forty below zero?'
They're an insanely retarded idea for automotive use.
An interface that requires the driver to take their eyes off the road has already failed. What's wrong with actual buttons and knobs?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
touch screens are new enough that most people haven't realized that they're a terrible interface.
... while every cheap car manufacturer is rushing to include unusable touch screen controls for everything... ... Porsches still have one button for each function. It's not like they couldn't afford touch screens at those prices.
Do you have some kind of app that appends all of your messages to the subject or do you painstakingly count exactly how many characters will fit in the subject line? Inquiring minds want to know!
Goddammit! That was probably a fucking nipple. The work firewall just bitched at me! Great, now I have to go tell Sarge I was not surfing porn....again....
Yep! Everyone thinks they can just get rid of the Engineers. The PHBs, the bean counters, marketdroids and the like all think we are just sucking up company resources for no useful reason whatsoever. Never mind we're probably making the product you sell. Suddenly though we're the greatest thing EVAR when shit breaks. Funny how they forget that 20 minutes later when we ask for a new soldering iron or multimeter. We'll still bail your stupid asses out though because that's how we roll!
You're still diverting a hand away from the steering wheel and your gaze off the road in order to perform a sequence of gestures.
Do these designers take into account user interfaces from the point of least likely to cause an accident by a distracted driver?
lol, it's a display with a big red button on the dash.
I want my car infotainment system to run Android, so that I can use my favourite car-adapted apps to run the radio, show me the map, play movies, whatever Android can do. (Change music depending on where I am? Why not. Use voice commands? Why not. Future application I didn't think of? Why not, it's Android.)
Then whoever feels like running interfaces like this, can do that, just download the app.
But then the car stereo shouldn't be on a more important CAN bus that it can possibly control the AAC, far from any driving control or unlocking of the car.
... VOICE ACTIVATED?
Any UI for incar usage which requires you to touch the screen during driving is a bad UI, because you shouldn't be touching the screen at all while driving.. So any designer coming up with stuff like that is a bad designer from the start and doesn't have safety in mind.. Any important function needed during driving should be as a button or lever connected to the steering wheel so you would never have to take your hands of it..
FTFA :-
... the interface leverages the driver’s muscle memory"
"create innovative software experiences for these new input mechanisms"
"controls for air condition and infotainment"
"big, forgiving gestures that can be performed anywhere.
What a load of BS. Why do I need an "innovative software experience" when I am driving FFS? The very glossiness of his web page shows him up as a salesman. FAIL
A screen is essentially for looking at. You should not be looking at a screen while driving. I know my car controls - old-fashioned knobs and buttons - by feel.
I don't want to hear a station, I want to here a genre of station or a sports event or a specific artist or song - regardless of frequency or media.
I don't want to adjust the volume, I want the volume to adjust to a) number of people in the vehicle adjusting for people in the back seat, b) conversation in the vehicle, c) ambient road noise d) my 'usual' volume levels
I don't want to adjust the temperature, I want the vehicle to defog the windscreen and keep the car at a reasonable temperature. I want it to blow air on me or away from me or my passengers
I don't want to punch in directions, I want to go to a) work, b) friends, c) a store, d) when the gas is low, automatically look for the nearest, cheapest gas etc. I should simply say: "Costco" or "Mom's house"
I don't want to deal with communications, I simply want to call someone.
I don't want to look at speed limits, but I DO want to be warned when: a) I am over by xMPH or b) when the speed limit DROPS and puts me over
I don't want to worry about maintenance, I want the car to find the best deal on the maintenance and parts required and suggest a dealer/garage based on ratings
I don't want to lock or unlock the car or worry about leaving interior lights on. The car should know I am near it and that I want in.
I don't want to deal with parking fees or tolls, the car should have an account that is universal to all those and simply ask for confirmation to deduct monies - either by route chosen or by length of time parked.
I don't want to have an accident. The car should assist with monitoring traffic conditions, other drivers and blind spots
*** Don't be dull.***
Please, do a new UI with style, with real wood like this The problem is the forced integration betwen car related systems and car "radio". In the Lancia Fulvia, car radio, clock, heating and engine control are totally separate systems both physically and on the user interface. If you need to change the radio station or engage the fast idle on the carbureator, you'll use two completly different knobs. Next the integration makes difficult to mount a car radio with a sensible user interface, they still make 'em.
A new car UI?
Stick with the steering wheel, thank you very much. And analog dials (including the speedo), that can be checked in the time it takes to run over one pedestrian, instead of the digital ones that need the time it takes to run over THREE.
Oh, you meant the "enterntainment system"?
DIN hole and ISO connector. It will be compatible with whatever we have in 20 years, when USB and iPhone cables are as modern as the casette tape player my car had from the factory is today. Except, in the digital world, things tend to get outdated a lot faster than casette tape did.
...you have to search for where the UI has moved the control *this* time. Or cope with having hit the wrong control because the UI guessed wrong about which control you wanted. Much better, I'm sure.
Like the new Lincoln MKZ with TOUCH controls for volume and temperature, on a smooth surface, without any tactile reference. Bravo!
I even have the push buttons and rotary controls for the heater, it used to be that you could control everything with 2 slides, one for temp and one to choose where to send the air.
It was very easy to know, only by touch, where the slides are. With a rotary button, you have to look at it to see where it is pointing. And the push buttons are also much less convenient, if I have to put the control on front defrost quickly (because the windshield is suddenly fogging) with the old controls I only had to slide it all the way to the right.
Now I have to find the front defrost button wich is the second to the right, flush with all the other buttons.
Even in car manuals of the 70's and 80's it was stated that if you want to defog or defrost the car in an emergency you just put the 2 slides to the right or to the top (depending on the orientation of the controls) without thinking, it will automatically put the heater to front defrost and maximum heat.
It's the same problem with almost every interface today, from electronics (think about how easy and fast it was to change the volume or choose the input on a 70's Receiver, with it's big buttons compared to receivers of today with it's tiny buttons and display you have to look at)
Don't get me started on volume and mute controls. Why don't laptops get a physical cut off switch as a mute button? When I power up my laptop in a library or at school I have to remember if I put it on mute the last time, and if not I need to wait for the mute button to become responsive but since it's controlled by software and a certain driver, it becomes usable right after Windows decide to play it's login sound. Very annoying. How much would it cost to put a physical switch to cut out the electrical signal to the speakers???
I think we're moving backward with UI, today look ingenuity and trend is more important than usability.
Now get off my lawn!
Try it! Library of Babel
The problem is UX designers that need something to do. Stop trying to change everything.
From the same thought school which brought you Microsoft's Metro interface.
Let's see...
- No discoverability of the available functions - you have to learn the system before you can use the system
- No adaptability to different user needs - I guess if you don't have 5 fingers for whatever reason, you don't get to control your airflow!
- No familiarity - works like none of the numerous touchscreen devices already in the market
- Similar gestures do entirely different things - so let's see, how do I change radio, was it 2 or 4 fingers? Spread or closed? Did I open my hand enough?
Here's how you do a good dashboard interface:
- Have physical buttons for the stuff which is used frequently while driving: on/off, volume, changing radio, skipping track, answering the phone, etc.
- Have a touchscreen for things which require more complex controls and you're less likely to use during driving: Setting your GPS directions, configuring your playlists, etc.
- For complex functions which might me used while driving, offer voice control
- Otherwise just use the screen for showing basic information in a clean manner and easily readable: a map, the radio station, the track, time, temp, etc.
My sister recently purchased the Ford Fusion with all that technology packed inside, and It's by far one of the nicer infotainment systems on the market (IMO) -- but posters in here are getting it right. Fingerprints all over the mainstay console display is just ugly as sin only days after a fresh bath, so she always resorts to using the capacitive/hardware buttons.
Then there's the voice command stuff everyone is talking about. Again, all great for the one or two uses I get out of it when I borrow her vehicle for a day, but she never uses it and again, returns to using hardware buttons. Bare in mind, she is very technical, so she's used to all sorts of different interfaces and operating systems.
The bottom line is that the screens get dirty while already clunky, and the voice command stuff is still too much like talking to a computer. Until you can have easy conversational interaction with your device (or vehicle), neither interface is adequate as a replacement for current in-vehicle systems.
Seriously this is the most unintuitive design I've come across for a UI; honestly Windows 8 looks better. This is never going anywhere. The iPad has room for reasonably sized buttons, there is no reason for this garbage.
It is simple enough... the interface needs to be operated without looking. But why touch screen? Touch is necessary, but screen? If you are keeping your eyes on the road, you are not looking at it.
The illumination led on the environmental controls on my 8 year old car burned out a while ago. Guess what, I don't care. It is three dials that you can blindly reach and turn where you need them to go. if I want to check the setting, I just run my finger along the indicator of the dial... never taking my eyes off the road.
Does anyone remember the joke about the "Apple iWheel" controller? Perhaps they are on to something here. Make the edge dynamically textured so you can feel what settings you are on and a simple turn-and-click to select settings.
Alternatively if we want to keep a flat screen so it can show info during times when it is safe to look... whatever happened to this technology?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The real evolution will be when you will be able to control every system from the steering wheel, without seeing, and receiving confirmation inside the dashboard, not even on the windshield (HUD style) it could really confuse you. It's not an easy job, I already have something very rudimentary in my Peugeot 308, behind the steering wheel I have a control with 5 buttons and a wheel, which allows me to control a lot of functions very easy and fast. I rarely use the controls on the stereo itself. Something like that would be the future. And no, not touch interface, something physical, recognizable just by touching, and easy to manipulate when the car is jumping around.
Ooh, I'm a sock puppet now? But I thought I was a real boy... Jimminy, YOU LIED!!!!!
Relax, I wasn't defending Lumpy, don't even know who he is. Besides, don't we go way back?
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Do they also not realise that gestures you have to think about are liable to be 'repeated' in your other hand? Kinda like how if new drivers look to the side, they drive off the road, because their hands follow their eyes.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Its like VI for your car. Powerful and easy to use, but you'll need a cheat sheet for the first two months.
I'll bet you drive a car with an automatic spark advance. Beats me how today's drivers expect to maximize performance and economy if they leave that to stupid automation.
(From snopes, collected 1999):
Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."
In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release (by Mr. Welch himself) stating:
If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuver such as a left-turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would have to reinstall the engine.
4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
And one snopes missed: there would only be one screen in the middle of the dashboard, which would light up with a question mark if something went wrong. The experienced driver will know what to do to fix it.
It is, of course, too complex to go back to knobs and slides that you could distinguish by feel, and didn't have to look at icons (Engineer's Dictionary: a small, fuzzy, and incomprehensible pictograph to replace a perrfectly clear and comprehensible word).
mark, who can't figure out how to set the radio buttons on his new-to-him van
I can't wait until the put a touch screen steering wheel in there to drive with. Just use two fingers and turn them back and forth as you want to turn the car. Why not put a touch shifter into the car also. Then we will really have reached the awesomeness that the future will bring!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
The 2013 Renault Koleos is just frigging awful. .. .. The rest of the car is quite good .. but the radio etc is bad IMHO. ..
poorly implanted and badly designed
Does it work if you're wearing gloves? Because otherwise it would suck if you were in a cold climate, or wore gloves to protect your hands.
And what about those people who are missing fingers?
Wrong. I'm also quite familiar with phase/amplitude noise cancelation by sampling the environment away from the audio pickup. It takes engineering, but it's 100% doable. Engineers can solve these problems (they already have, actually.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's an interesting paranoid delusion you've got there, but the question you should really be asking yourself is "How do we always find you?"
Because in the end, we always do.
We always do...
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Get a chauffeur and stop whining.
Cars that drive themselves enough so we can look at the touchscreen (Preferably a Tesla-sized touchscreen). Removes the problem of distracting touchscreen interfaces to begin with. Add Siri-like voice control for more flexibility.