The thing that everyone always misses in these conversations is that screens over buttons is a cost cutting measure, not a first-principles design decision.
It means the UI can be designed and developed mostly independently of the physical controls, which helps reduce rework. I also expect it reduces costs for manufacture and assembly.
I’m in favour of more physical controls, but it surprises me that this rarely comes up. I suppose “people are idiots” is a more appealing explanation.
Somehow, the Dacia Sandero has physical controls for climate control and physical buttons on the steering wheel. It manages to do that whilst being one of the cheapest cars you can buy.
Having fewer functions means fewer controls are required. Fewer controls means fewer buttons. KISS tends to promote this.
If it's the choice between $50 worth of buttons and $100 worth of touchscreen, then $50 worth of buttons wins on cheapness.
And at that end of the market, it works (and it makes sense that it works).
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But at the other end of the market: Common luxury cars have lots of features, and KISS isn't really one of the design goals (if a customer wanted cheap and simple instead, perhaps they'd be shopping for a Dacia instead). Things are still built down to a cost, but there's a greater quantity of those things.
When the choice is between $200 worth of buttons or $100 worth of touchscreen, then $100 worth of touchscreen wins.
The dacia sandero has the buttons AND the touchscreen.
https://www.topgear.com/sites/default/files/cars-car/carouse...
> But at the other end of the market: Common luxury cars have lots of features, and KISS isn't really one of the design goals (if a customer wanted cheap and simple instead, perhaps they'd be shopping for a Dacia instead).
It wasn't always like this. Mercedes-Benz used to make high quality, straightforward automobiles without all the inspector gadget james bond crap. See e.g. W123, W124, W126. Luxury meant high build quality, safety, comfort, easy maintenance, and a lifetime of reliable, dependable performance. Not features--you get the same basic features (ok, temperature regulated climate control is kind of novel for the late '70s-early '80s W123). But this stuff was minimal. Now the whole goddamn car is an iphone app. It's disgusting.
Even a W123 can be complex compared to something like a spartan 1979 Dodge Aspen.
Electric power windows, vacuum-operated power locks, telescopic steering column, power-adjustable mirrors, a radio that does AM and FM...
Fancy stuff seemed pretty common on those (awesome, stout) German luxury cars.
The more I think about it and read comments here, the less sure I am that the gilded age of simple, reliable cars has ever actually existed. :)
The self-leveling hydraulic suspension in the W123 wagon was also a complication. The climate control system was failure prone, but failed in a sensible way--when the control unit failed it would no longer maintain a set temperature, but would still work as an open-loop system. The cruise control "computer" (completely analog device) was also prone to failure. But the thing is all that stuff was implemented simply, reliably, and with an eye towards service and maintainability. Maintaining the systems on a W123 was easy. I did it for almost a decade. It was a fancy car, but in a sensible high-quality way. It was built to be understood. There were excellent printed, bound shop manuals. It was obvious that an immense amount of thought went into the UX of working on that car. It wasn't just a luxurious car to drive it was also a luxurious car to maintain. Even the fucking hose clamps were special.. like, they had a continuous metal bearing surface so they don't cause pinch points and raised bosses for the worm gear threads to ride on instead of the punched slots you commonly find. Contrast that with the situation today. Everything was a lot better before corporations started using software as a wedge to separate users from real, meaningful ownership of their machines. It didn't have to be like that, they could have done it differently. Software could have been a wonderful thing for the automobile, but the way they chose to do it made it awful instead. And now everything is an iphone app with subscriptions and in-app purchases and engagement metrics. It's disgusting what these people have done to the world.
It's even more in regards to production planning. Building the production pipeline takes long and is inflexible as you need to ensure to pick suppliers which will provide spare parts for a sensible price for the whole lifecycle. Thus you limit capabilities very early in the design cycle.
A software based solution you can finalize last minute and with later updates add extra features. Thus if a competitor provides a feature you don't have to wait years for the next new design, but can deliver based on software development priorities any time, to any series you like (even add after delivery)
I'm not convinced it is that easy.
Cars traditionally have very generic button clusters, like [0]. It is even very common to have dummy buttons in there. Combine that with today's cars where those buttons are hooked up to some MCU to send a CAN message instead of being hardwired to a function-specific cable in a giant loom, and it is suddenly quite easy to change button functionality quite late in the design process for basically zero cost: you just need a slightly different label print and a small firmware patch!
Or, if you want to be 100% flexible, go with the ATM approach where physical buttons are placed next to an icon shown on a screen[1]. All of the flexibility and all of the tactile feedback! You can even go for a multi-level layout, with a top row of mode selection buttons, a bottom row of mode-specific function buttons, and perhaps even a big fat dial with haptic feedback[2]. Or even go all-out Elgato Stream Deck[3].
And sure, the fact that slapping in a giant touchscreen lets them decouple UX design from physical controls is going to play a big role. But it is by far the laziest and least user-friendly way of doing so. If that's the best you can come up with, you probably shouldn't be doing UX design at all.
[0]: https://www.classiccarstodayonline.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
[1]: https://media.istockphoto.com/id/672002868/vector/atm-machin...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip641WmY4pA
[3]: https://1.img-dpreview.com/files/p/E~TS940x788~articles/8521...