Physical Buttons Are Making A Comeback And The Tyranny Of The Touchscreen Is Breaking

I know it often seems like every bit of media you encounter is just a firehose of bad news, but I’m happy to inform you that’s not always the case. A great example of this has to do with the seemingly overwhelming expansion of the touch screen as the universal interface for everything on your car’s dashboard.

For years now, it’s seemed like a depressing inevitability that touchscreen interfaces would take over everything, but there’s a pushback happening. Buttons are picking themselves up, dusting themselves off, and coming for touchscreens, because the truth is we’re flapjacking done with everything crammed onto a touchscreen. It’s happening.

This movement away from shoving every possible control onto a touchscreen has been simmering for a while, as the people who actually use these cars on a daily basis are realizing that you don’t always want to navigate into an attention-demanding screen-based interface to do basic things, and as a result, have a newfound appreciation for tactile controls. This was noted recently in studies done by Hyundai Design North America (HDNA), as reported by Korea’s JoongAng Daily:

Hyundai Motor was one of many automakers who, following Tesla’s lead, have rolled out touch screen infotainment across their models over the past decade, often replacing the knobs that had historically controlled features like air conditioning and radio — going so far as to show off a touch screen concept steering wheel in 2019. It appeared to publicly reverse course early last year, however, stating at the launch of the Hyundai Kona that it was committed to keeping physical buttons and dials in its vehicles in the near future. Its current lineup, including the refreshed Ioniq 5, features more analog controls across the board.

That course reversal, HDNA said, wasn’t purely motivated by safety or profitability concerns. Largely, American customers just found it annoying.

“As we were adding integrated [infotainment] screens in our vehicles, we also tried out putting touchscreen-based controls, and people didn’t prefer that,” said HDNA Vice President Ha Hak-soo.

It feels vindicating to finally read very clear statements about touchscreen controls like “American customers just found it annoying” and “people didn’t prefer that.” Because it’s true!

There was also a recent article on IEEE Spectrum titled Touchscreens Are Out, and Tactile Controls Are Back, which I think pretty much sums up what it’s all about. The article referenced an actual physical button researcher, Rachel Plotnick, who has written an entire book on the subject of button pushing and is currently being sought after to help carmakers re-introduce physical buttons and controls to their dashboards.

Here’s what she had to say about the shift away from touchscreen controls and back to tactile controls:

There was this kind of touchscreen mania, where all of a sudden everything became a touchscreen. Your car was a touchscreen, your refrigerator was a touchscreen. Over time, people became somewhat fatigued with that. That’s not to say touchscreens aren’t a really useful interface, I think they are. But on the other hand, people seem to have a hunger for physical buttons, both because you don’t always have to look at them—you can feel your way around for them when you don’t want to directly pay attention to them—but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback.

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That’s not to say buttons don’t work with screens very nicely—they’re often partners. But in a way, it’s taking away the priority of vision as a sense, and recognizing that a screen isn’t always the best way to interact with something.

When I’m driving, it’s actually unsafe for my car to be operated in that way. It’s hard to generalize and say, buttons are always easy and good, and touchscreens are difficult and bad, or vice versa. Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.

There definitely was a touchscreen mania, and I think you can argue we’re still in that mania, even if cracks are finally starting to show. The maddening thing about all of this is that the limitations and flaws of touchscreen interfaces really should have been evident from the very beginning. It was always clear that navigating and using a touchscreen was more demanding of attention and visual focus, because that’s just how they are; it’s a flat, smooth surface and the controls on the screen change function and location, which means you have to look at it, you have to take your focus and attention off the road and direct it at the screen to see what it’s displaying and where the control is for what you want to do.

For example, look at the air vent controls in a Rivian:

Compare that to the effort to just move a vent, which has stayed in the same place on the dash since the first time you saw that car.

Buttons work better because of their limitations: they’re immobile, and their functions are unchanging. That’s limiting, yes, but in a good way. For controls that you’re likely to want to use at any moment – any of the HVAC controls, for example, or basic things like audio volume and lights and wipers and glove box doors, there simply isn’t any good reason to make those part of a touchscreen interface.

There’s a place for screens on a dashboard, no question. And there are many controls, ones that generally aren’t used while in the process of driving, that can be great on a touchscreen, or things like maps and detailed owner’s manual text and all sorts of other stuff that a touchscreen can be used for. Maybe there are things we haven’t thought of yet it can be better suited for, too, like showing videos of how to do owner-maintenance tasks like changing cabin air filters or something?

There’s a place for screens and physical controls in cars. Maybe we had to go through this touchscreen obsession to realize what makes sense and what doesn’t but I’m glad we finally seem to be figuring that out.

Attention Car UX Designers: Explain To Me Why Touchscreen HVAC Vent Controls Aren’t Idiotic, Please

Europe Is Requiring Physical Buttons For Cars To Get Top Safety Marks, And We Should, Too

Here’s What Happened When I Confronted Volvo’s Head Designer About The Company’s Egregious Decision To Require A Touchscreen Button To Open The EX90’s Glovebox