Touchscreens Ain't Always a Good Thing


We had held on to my old car, the Santro Xing, for an abnormally long period of 14 years, until we bought a new one recently, the i10. It was a similar price/feature car (adjusting for inflation and the evolution in car tech), but given how old the last car was, even the average sized touchscreen was something new! Being a low/medium end car, there are still plenty of physical controls in the car.

Why I bored you with so much detail about a not-a-high-end-car is that it made this article by Amber Case on the “hidden cost of touchscreens” very relatable. Huh? What kind of Luddite thinking is this, you ask. Isn’t everything in the world moving to touchscreens and thereby providing a better experience? Yes, but Case’s point was about the downside of touchscreens in certain fields, not in general, and the problem with poorly designed interfaces in touchscreens.

In cars, for examples, she writes:
“Physical interfaces are crucial for automotive usability. Operations rely on a simple glance or muscle memory. Touchscreens, by contrast, force drivers to look. Because buttons are not fixed to specific locations, screens inhibit muscle memory and findability. Touchscreens compete for attention with the driving process, adding to the dangers of distracted driving.”
For the same reasons, she extends her point to:
“Serious interfaces — those that are repeatedly used by a knowledgeable professional and/or in potentially hazardous situations, should not be touchscreen based.”

Even when touchscreens are value-additive, they don’t always follow some basic rules of user interface design:
“Color-based interfaces take less time to parse when they are glanced at. Image-based interfaces take longer for the brain to process, and the lack of contrast can be confusing, because each item must be distinguished from adjacent items.”

Physical interfaces force a decision on the placement of (physical) buttons. And good or bad, we eventually learn to find and use them by muscle memory. But in touchscreens, button placement is software controlled, and while that allows one to fix bad design easily, it also leads to the situation that one cashier put so eloquently (bitterly?):
“When this one becomes tolerable, they’ll change the software on me.”

I can relate to many of the points Case raises. Is that because I am getting old? Or because she makes some good points?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJune 13, 2018 at 7:39 AM

    Oh oh! I hope our Instrumentation engineers all over the world know about this. (I am sure they will.) There are plenty of touch screen operations on the Process Operation Consoles designed by these engineers, serving the Petrochemical, Pipeline, Metallurgy and such other Industries.

    In my time, it was a hybrid - with touch-screen consoles, keyboards and mouse/equals. In addition, there would be special easy access consoles full of manually operated push buttons, selector switches and all. In addition, there will a row of control panels, full of instrumentation such as indicators having pointers, annunciators (process alarm announcement), manual recorders and all.

    The point of this blog, is probably always would get taken care of because we used to be fuzzy about things faults occurring and fanatical safety because operational dangers just cannot be allowed - for our own (engineering consultants') survival.

    As to commoners dying because they would be glued to the mobile doing almost throughout the driving time, or commoners ignore all dangers (not out of courage, but) because they are immersed in the selfie catching, that should be OK. If they choose death, they should be allowed to do so. See, we live in free world, don't we?

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