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
Only the most ardent of fanbois I’ve met in my life actually like the touch screen vent controls. I had a rental kia a while back and while it had physical buttons you had to press a button to swap between audio and hvac controls and it drove me mad. Everytime I thought I was changing the volume I was adjusting the fan speed. Buttons are nice! When you put effort into buttons they feel premium and weighty and special. Obviously you need options in menus because there’s so much in cars but buttons are great! More Buttons! Buttons!
My spouse drove my Blazer EV and between the 17-inch screen for radio and maps, 11-inch screen for the speedometer, the rear view mirror now is a camera, and the head ups display, he said this is too much, he asked me how to turn things off lol
One of the reasons we picked the Prologue vs the Blazer EV was the Honda had more physical buttons for stuff.
The rear view mirror being a camera was definitely a no-go.
You know the rear view mirror can be switched on and off right? It’s dead useful if your trunk is loaded with stuff
There is a huge and predictable downside of Touch Screen-Everything for automakers, that I suspect is the true reason we are seeing a return to physical controls.
10-15 years ago, there were good and bad smartphones. The cheap ones had crappy plastic and laggy, low-def screens. There were a handful of software companies designing user interfaces. Now, the market has settled on a slab of glass and alloy, and even the cheapest phone is crisp and snappy. Some may have more storage, cameras or battery life, but basic day-to-day interaction with the device is 95% the same. There is a duopoly between iOS and Android.
The tactile quality of physical controls has long been a place manufacturers can show off their design prowess, and quality/ value engineering, directly to the customer. Moving everything onto a screen throws away that differentiation between brands and price points, and cedes that territory to outside companies who already dominate the digital space.
I think as electrified vehicles proliferate, (already a very homogeneous experience) automakers will realize pushing vehicles entirely into digital objects ultimately does their brands a disservice. If the only way to interact with a device is through a screen, it is almost inevitable that said device simply becomes a vessel for a dominant software company’s digital experience, much like the market for PCs or Android phones. Touch screens are here to stay, but we will see a renewed focus on physical switch gear. It’s really all manufacturers have if they want to retain some semblance of control.
This makes sense. It’s also probably the logic behind GM going too far and dropping AirPlay and CarPlay to develop their own system with “conviction.” I feel like a return to buttons is a happy medium because I’d rather deal with the airplay that’s the same in every car than a siloed solution for my tech needs.
The ironic thing for GM, is while they’ve eliminated CarPlay and Android Auto, their new system is based entirely on Android automotive. They are now more integrated with Google than ever.
I can’t help but think this is the eventual conclusion for every OEM, especially the smaller brands. They will all run a reskinned Android, with only Tesla (and maybe a few others like Ford) bothering to develop their own operating systems.
If only customers and journalists had been saying this constantly for the last 5 years! Then it might not have come to this!
….oh wait
The problem is design and manufacturing lines are set up years before cars are actually released so apart from minor changes here and there the big hard points of a vehicle can’t be really changed until the next generation. It’s good automakers as a whole are for the most part correcting their overcorrection, but some car marques are going to have a long wait before the cars get them.
My newest pet peeve on cars? Not having 4 window switches on the driver door. This is an absolute no go and I can’t believe even premium brands like Volvo are doing it right now.
The two window switch + haptic toggle is just the worst. Saves them no money, and forces you to take your eyes off the road. Like I’d almost rather they eliminate the switches entirely at that point.
I’d love to own a Volvo EV at some point, but not until they cut that shit out. Goes against everything the brand used to stand for.
Rasslin’ with a screen in winter while manipulating gloves is just plain unsafe.
As Philip J Fry said “I am shocked, shock! Well, not that shocked” also another annoying issue you can wrong into with touch screen everything and what I ran into with my fiances tourx the other day (which does still have some physical buttons) is when the touch screen just decided to freeze up and a simple key cycle isn’t enough for it to reboot it either needs to sit for a bit or batteries unplugged and plugged back it. When it froze up you could not do anything besides mute the radio (couldn’t change volumes or stations, connect to bluetooth etc or get into climate controls or any other settings.) Luckily it has some physical buttons for climate control that still worked even with the screen frozen. But question is what happens if you have a software glitch like this when driving? Probably not the greatest to be messing around trying to see if you can get the damn information to reboot either while driving or trying to pull over to reboot it on a busy road.
There is a balance to be struck between buttons and screens. Trying to navigate a touchscreen interface with a scroll wheel and buttons is also an exercise in frustration.
I’m looking at you, Mazda, with your Android Auto interface.
I had a rental CX-5 and while trying to navigate the hellish gauntlet that is the Toronto area of the 401, I wanted to put my fist through the screen.
Why the hell is the OE interface touch-compatible, but Android auto, through the same screen was solely button and scroll wheel interface?!
Thanks for reminding me of how bad their infotainment interface is. A potential future Mazda3/CX-30 hybrid is on a list of potential future vehicles and I forgot how maddeningly bad their interface is.
as a counterpoint, i love that my 2023 Mazda 3 infotainment (including AA) is controlled by the scroll wheel and buttons. ymmv.
especially because the scroll wheel is always where your right hand just already wants to be.
“People seem to have a hunger for physical buttons”. Having spent a childhood endlessly pressing the buttons on cassette players and rejoicing in micro-orgasm of experiencing a nice soft-opening tape deck, this is a sentence I can relate to. Didn’t Lexus have an engineer who’s only task was to perfect the tactile feedback on their buttons?
Nobody’s mentioning the other big problem of touchscreens. Even if you never touch them, they steal your attention. We’re conditioned from childhood to be entertained by screens. They’re bright and vivid, even when the outside world is not. The brightness of LCD screens is not infinitely variable. In bright sun, they’re prone to glare and the look dim; at night, every setting seems too bright. Central dash screens inevitably draw your eyes away from where you’re going.
Every wreck I’ve caused came from looking the wrong way at the wrong time. I’ve gotten better over the years, but I don’t want my car working against me.
You may have been conditioned from childhood to be entertained by screens. I, however, was conditioned from teenagehood not to be on the internet because we’re expecting a call. Buttons rule.
I fancy myself an excellent driver and pride myself on trying my best to stay distraction free in the car, but man if I’m ever in a single-screen-for-everything vehicle I find it damn near impossible to keep my eyes on the road. I have pretty shite adhd so I fidget with controls while I drive and I can do that and keep my eyes on the road in any car I own because buttons! but some rentals are just the worst. I tend to stick to the gas guzzling full size SUVs or a Mustang when I rent simply because they tend to have buttons.
My biggest concern with the giant center-mounted screens is their effect on night vision. Granted, not a concern in cities or other places with plenty of streetlights, but for driving at night on rural highways with the hazards of deer and elk, I want all of the interior lighting as dim as possible to preserve my night vision. If I can turn the screen off, fine. If I need the screen to do stuff while driving, that’s a problem.
Hey screen makers and interface developers, how about a “night mode” making the center screen monochrome red or amber for better night vision?
This. So much this. I live in a small town in the mountains. There are deer strikes every winter on every road around my house. Hell, I’ve narrowly avoided 3 deer already this fall. I keep my interior (analog gauges etc) lighting down around half brightness at the most. Drives my wife bonkers because she gets in a car and the gauges are all dim. But even a black, blank screen produces light when on, and that is exactly what I don’t want. I put a 7.5 inch double din screen in her truck (backup camera etc) and its fine, but you can’t turn off the screen, so at night I end up draping a jacket over the dash because I can’t stand the screen just being on and bright, even if I make it basically blank and black.
My two cars were born in the mid twentyteens, so they duplicate many functions on both physical controls and touchscreens. My 2017 Ford provides both fr the audio system, and I always finding myself using the tuning button instead of the screen, plus the steering wheel volume controls. My favorite button is the one that turns the dash screen OFF. That’s how I roll.
The 2014 Mercedes is a museum of beautiful buttons, including the obsolete telephone number pad, but I don’t mind. I like the metal joystick on the console, too, precisely because it took some effort to learn how to use it. That’s another aspect of control and satisfaction.
With their wall-to-wall dash screen mania, the carmakers have been walling me out of the new car market. It would be good for that to change back a bit.
I think it’s honestly a really simple rule for this:
If it’s a control that doesn’t require your full attention, button or knob. Changing volume, temperature, flicking on lights, picking the right drive mode, turning on a steering wheel heater. None of that requires your full attention to do, so you want a control that also doesn’t require your attention.
If it DOES require your full attention, screen. Because it’s stuff that you’re going to have to be parked or handing it off to your passenger anyway so it doesn’t need a dedicated control. So vehicle settings, address entry, music selection.
Can this period of automotive history (hopefully now in terminal decline) be known as the “touchscreen tyranny” with due credit to Torch?
I find it hilarious that the commercial showing off the GMC Hummer EV’s crabwalk mode features the Chemical Brothers’ “Galvanize” song.
“Push the Button.” Although it appears to be a BMW/Mazda-ish rotary dial.
It’s interesting to me that Michelin used the same song a couple of years ago in a very different ad.
I definitely love a touchscreen for some things, like CarPlay, and vehicle settings. Your idea of offering useful videos and user manual text is great as well. I don’t get it when people say they’re distracting though. It’s not like you’re watching movies on it.
But maybe I feel that way because my Acura is smartly laid out, with a well-positioned touchscreen, alongside clicky and tactile knobs and buttons, so I wonder about the touchscreen hate sometimes.
Then I look inside a Tesla, or other kind of car that’s pretty much ONLY a touchscreen. That’s just cheap for the sake of being cheap. They’re trying to disguise their cheapness as “technology”, and I guess it works on some people. “Less things to go wrong!” they say, to make themselves feel better.
While I do love having a touchscreen, I’m also somewhat old-school, so part of me wants my car to ALSO have a bunch of heavy toggle switches (ooh, maybe on an overhead panel!), and even some of those glowing jewel buttons like they had in the 60s…
When that One Thing does go wrong, everything goes wrong. It becomes a single point of failure. Can Tesla even be driven with a dead screen?
Yes.
You can use the steering wheel buttons by holding them out & to the outside position to restart the screen
I agree Teslas approach w/ everything on 1 screen is a single point of failure and something no one asked for.
I think the thinking was certainly full self driving was going to take over driving duties so we all could zone out and watch videos on the screen.
Elon has been promising FSD for what the last 8 years now?
Us 80s kids LOVE a good overhead console.
Oh yeah! I remember the overhead console in my dad’s 1994 Grand Cherokee. It didn’t have much going on other than storage, but it always seemed so cool to me. I remember we had a rental Limited GC, and of course, it didn’t have the overhead console because of a sunroof, and it just seemed so plain overhead.
Good. And that’s a safety thing. You don’t need to rely on a screen, or navigating through multiple submenus, if you can handle basic controls with just a click. Plus, buttons have physical feedback. And don’t need to worry about if you are wearing gloves.
Ok, so is Tesla doing buttons and knobs or sticking with the all-screen thing?
Hot take incoming: Tesla will never—never!—redesign their interiors, because Tesla is not a car company. A car company would react to the market and user feedback. Tesla believes they got it right the first time and the user needs to adapt/get out of the way.
I mean, you are correct that Tesla is a car company second (or possibly third or fourth…depending how you count…), but the interior design elements, to me, feel more like they’re being controlled by one person with outsized power.
I have just a smidgen of hope they might make some better design decisions once said person gets bored/moves on/etc.
Anybody think we’ll have any luck getting rid of the button to toggle whether the two window up/down buttons control the front or back windows?
That was only VW, right? I’m pretty sure every owner and reviewer lambasted them for that, to the point where I’d be surprised if any other automaker tries that again.
Maybe it is only VW. I’m not in the market for a new vehicle, especially anything European, so I don’t read all of the car reviews with enough detail nor regularly test drive vehicles to have any idea how far that particular bad idea has migrated.
I think BMW is the only company (so far) that requires a vacuum to suck up the oil from the top rather than drain it out of the bottom – I hope that particular engineering solution doesn’t spread to other manufacturers, either.
I’m convinced that the manufacturers have load off all the human factors/ergonomics engineers as well as the industrial engineering department.
The funny thing with human factors is that beyond some fairly simple rules of thumb (like ~10% of males are some kind of red/green color blind) and kinesthetics, most human factors is a guess and you need to confirm with real humans. Humans will do things that you do not expect them to do.
Are you implying that the manufacturers skipped human testing and went right to production? It sure seems that way to me.
Indeed that seems to be what is happening- I have been working on products that require FDA approval (clearance for those in the industry) and every trial starts with a human factors study where we give the instructions and the device to a bunch of civilians and see what they do – which is just about anything! On one pre-trial product we had phds taking the device apart on us – we ended up having to use shrink wrap these components with a heavyweight wrap to prevent this. And sometimes the humans surprise you and actually follow the directions!
It’s random. I’ve worked in software most of my career and humans sometimes do the most unexpected things. You try to engineer the solution and anticipate things, but then something comes at you from 47 degrees off left field. Boom, system crashes.
Sometime back in the sixties I remember reading a Consumer Reports review of the new cars and one of the things they stressed was the right combination of knobs buttons and levers in readily accessible places to allow the driver to adjust whatever he needed to without taking his eyes off the road. With a touch screen one needs to watch a finger move to the right place on the screen and then touch the exact spot on the screen which on a rough road can be a moving target requiring several attempts but whatever you do don’t touch your phone because that’s dangerous!!
Up front, I’ll say I do think touchscreens are the most versatile method for navigation/music/infotainment.
I think an underrated aspect to some vehicle touchscreens is, depending on the design (such as the 9″ aftermarket unit in my car, which sticks out from the dash), you can put one finger on the edge of the device to steady your hand relative to the screen, allowing for easier hand-eye coordination. If you do that too strongly with a phone, you risk knocking it off its mount or something similar. Plus, of course, the dash screens are bigger and (ideally) have larger icons to push.
Nonetheless, I’m absolutely in favor of tactile controls for car (mechanical) functions, and climate control.
“The red button there, kid. Don’t ever touch the red button.”
Is it possible that sanity persists into the age of foul odor?
Once again, Torch buries the lede. The real story here is THE RETURN OF GORDON KEEBLE.
All this common sense and a Gordon Keeble too! They have many many toggle switches, a variety of rotary knobs and a random selection of push-pull switches for added fun. And seven dials, two column stalks and a partridge in a pear tree.
Now if they would bring back toggles. The most satisfying control. Flick flick flick engage!
Honda figured this out a while ago. I don’t know about the other models, but the early 10th gen Civics had a haptic volume slider which was universally panned. For 2018 or 19, they changed it to a knob and there was much rejoicing. Why everyone else didn’t learn that lesson is baffling.
What seems bizarre is the desire to “try some new solution” for something that was working just fine
What’s really bizarre is that someone had to have tried it before production started, and decided to do it anyway.
When it comes to dash controls, nothing is as cute as a button.