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Honda Bucks Industry Trend by Removing Touchscreen Controls

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 01 2020, @04:47AM   
from the inappropriate-touching dept.

DannyB writes:

Honda bucks industry trend by removing touchscreen controls:

Honda has done what no other car maker is doing, and returned to analogue controls for some functions on the new Honda Jazz.

While most manufacturers are moving to touchscreen controls, identifying smartphone use as their inspiration - most recently seen in Audi's latest A3 - Honda has decided to reintroduce heating and air conditioning controls via a dial rather than touchscreen, as in the previous-generation Jazz.

Jazz project leader Takeki Tanaka explained: "The reason is quite simple - we wanted to minimise driver disruption for operation, in particular, for the heater and air conditioning.

^<no-sarcasm>
It seems to me that neither physical controls nor voice controlled operation are fundamentally incompatible with cars being both smart and connected.
_{</no-sarcasm>}

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Original Submission

• Clueless designers, or cost savings? Clueless designers, or cost savings? (Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday April 01 2020, @10:32AM (1 child)

  by bradley13 (3053) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @10:32AM (#977987) Homepage Journal

  It's pretty much all been said: touch screens for driver controls are a brain-dead idea, and evern generation of designers seems to feel compelled to repeat all the mistakes already corrected by previous generations.

  That said, no one so far has mentioned what is likely *the* reason behind touch screen interfaces: cost savings. You've got to have that screen anyway, so save the money of installing (and interfacing with) physical controls. You not only save on the hardware, you save on having an interface to that hardware, and you can hire cheap "app" designers instead of engineers who know how to make a computer talk to external hardware.

  If you kill all a few extra customers? Well, we already said that this was a "brain-dead" idea - they're just taking it literally... /s

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• Re:Clueless designers, or cost savings? (Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:30AM

  by acid andy (1683) on Wednesday April 01 2020, @11:30AM (#977998) Homepage Journal

  you can hire cheap "app" designers instead of engineers

  Have you noticed how buggy a lot of these modern UIs are as well? I can't speak for controls built into cars but I'm thinking of low to mid level monitors, TVs and car stereos for example. Particularly when the device does have a small number of physical buttons, I keep finding bugs where each button seems to change its function depending on where I am in the UI. For example, on a modern screen, which buttons move up and down the current menu, which button steps back to the parent menu, and which button applies the current menu item, often seems to randomly shuffle depending on which menu is currently visible! I wonder when they build these things if they just delegate each menu screen to a different developer, throw all the code together and perform zero testing before shipping the thing. It's insane. I mean, they can't really cut back on quality control much further before we get to the day where every product is a completely, utterly unusable and totally broken brick on arrival.

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