More importantly, car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.

That’s why I think it must be a legal requirement for any car with touchscreen controls to operate car functions must have driver assistance features enabled, no exceptions.

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scottyah 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just like the article mentioned, you can't just say that touchscreens are dangerous without bringing up how many buttons do not make it better UX. There are plenty of touchscreen designs that are way better than buttons.

The only metric that matters is how fast you can get attention back on the road.

	▲	sedatk 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Simple. I can operate any button without taking my attention from the road at all as long as the said button has a distinct feeling and/or location. That’s immediately an infinitely better experience. BMW iDrive buttons are an excellent example for that.
	▲	Miraste 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There are zero touchscreen designs that are better than (physical, tactile) buttons. You can hit buttons without taking your eyes off the road. You cannot do this with a touchscreen. There's no way to design or engineer around it, it's simply the wrong tool for the job.

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JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> car touchscreens are dangerous. It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself

They're dangerous for controls the driver would reasonably need to operate while driving the car. They're fine for more-complex at-rest configuration, or stuff a passener would care about.

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agloe_dreams 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It’s impossible to operate a touchscreen without moving your attention from the road to the touchscreen itself.

The article directly links to a study that shows this is also true of physical buttons. Regardless of the fact that buttons are tactile, people don't go feeling up their radio without looking, even if they can. Furthermore, the vast majority of infotainment input today is into phone mirroring systems like carplay.

This whole thing is compounded by the fact that Mazda's knob solution was actually worse while being marketed as better. While a touchscreen needs to be looked at to find a button, a cursor controlled by a knob needs to be watched in whole to navigate to the button. Your fine motor skills as a human allows you to directly press a button, physical or not, without looking at your arm to get near it.

	▲	SoftTalker 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You're right in that with a physical control you still probably glance at it as you're reaching for it, but you don't have to keep your eyes on it the whole time unlike a touch screen. With a touch-screen there's no feedback that your finger is on the button and that you have actually pressed it. With a physical control, button, knob, or slider once you have your hand on it you can manipulate it without looking. They demand momentary glances, not seconds of constant focus.
	▲	PunchyHamster 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Well, it depends on button and function. Rarely used functions will require looking, common ones (assuming button placement is sensible) will not, but even ones that require looking are still better because you skip going thru the menu to find it.

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anon7000 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Mazda’s rotary knob also has safety issues. Let’s say I want to zoom the Google Maps in or out in CarPlay) at some point in my navigation.

With the knob, you have a few issues:

1. iOS made the focus border on UI elements very faint. So it’s hard to tell where the knob is at rotating through all the UI elements.

2. Because zoom is kind of a sub feature, you have to rotate through like 10 buttons to get to the right thing, click, then get into a submenu.

3. Because not many apps design around the knob… the active “cursor” can get trapped in a submenu where the knob just rotates between a few buttons and can’t escape back to the root of the app.

Basically, it takes active attention to zoom in/out. Touch screen, I could probably do it without looking.

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max8539 an hour ago | parent [-]

With a knob, you always could stop what you are doing and look back at the road and then continue. With a touch screen, you need to find a button and touch it without looking at the road, or you need to do it from the start again.

	▲	wvenable 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I have this knob and I don't understand your point. With the knob or the touch screen, you need to look at the screen to see what you're doing. The knob merely controls a cursor. I find the knob considerably more distracting. First you have translate the motion of the knob to the cursor moving on the screen. Secondly, you have to cycle through all the options so you have to spend even more time looking at the screen. It's significantly faster and less distracting to just reach out and tap the button you want. Other physical buttons are great but the knob is a terrible UI.