Buttons Are Never Coming Back, and Touchscreens Are Here to Stay

Integrating less-used features into the screen is fine... but taking away AC knobs/buttons is insane

People don't hate screens and only wants buttons. People hate EVERYTHING being on screens. Needing to navigate 3 menus on a potentially laggy screen on a cold day vs a single button is a huge difference for comfort

doug greatly underestimates the desire i have for my car to have an airplane cockpit

Doug is the type of guy to spend 10 minutes arguing against a position nobody has.

things like climate controls, headlights, gear selector (TESLA), radio, and other basic functions shold be buttons. the rest can be on the screen

I don’t think people want everything to be controlled by buttons, but rather for everything not to be controlled by a touch screen. We just need a healthy balance of both

Doug after 9 minutes does agree that there's basic stuff that shouldn't be in screens. This is what most people are saying. We don't want to adjust the volume on the stereo via the touch screen, we don't want to adjust our intermittent wiper timing in a touch screen, we don't want to select drive or reverse via a slider in a touch screen, we don't want to have to drag our finger on a touch screen to adjust where a air vent blows, we don't want to adjust the climate control's cabin temperature via a area on a touch screen. All this basic stuff that you want to adjust while driving, looking at the road, we want to be able to do via physical buttons & dials that can be done all by feel. We don't want captive touch buttons or sliders that don't provide feedback either. Buttons that click and dials that you turn, that's what we want. repeatedly pushing a up & down button to adjust the volume on the stereo drives me crazy, a simple dial is so much better. There is a happy medium and most car manufacturers have gone too far into touch screen integrations, Telsa is by far the worst offender here but even Hyundai & Kia need to pull it back a bit. The Grenadier having all those buttons works for that car because of it's intended market & use and it was such a glorious sight to behold a manufacturer going the other way. I've got a 2019 GM and that has a perfect balance between buttons, dials and touch screen. Manufactures had the balance right but then went too far.

Doug the type of guy to make up button extremists that don’t exist to have fake arguments with for the first 9:00 of the video

Doug, you missed the mark on this one. Nobody wants a button for every single feature. All we ask for is physical controls for basic features such as volume and climate

Don't gaslight me Doug

Generally if it was a button in 2008 it should probably always be a button.

Doug: It's okay to put everything in the screens Doug 5 minutes later: We should have the stuff people use all the time stay as physical controls and keep less used stuff in the screens Oh, you mean like how ALL OF US have been saying to do it? No one cares that ambient lighting brightness and turn signal volume setting are in the screen, but things that get used EVERY DAY should 95% of the time stay out of the screen. And off of capacitive touch "buttons" as well.

I refuse to believe anyone (besides my 70 yo dad) wants only buttons or anyone (besides weird Tesla fanatics) wants no buttons. People just want buttons for button things and screens for screen things.

Who is saying NOTHING should be on screens, seriously who?! Doug spent 9 minutes convincing people who don't exist that screens can be useful before finally admitting that he agrees with us. Obviously there are functions that are better implemented on screens, but the way we're going eventually the turn signals will be an on screen function buried under 3 layers of menus.

Not even MENTIONING that you can physically FEEL for buttons while keeping your eyes on the road is an EPIC FAIL Doug.

You are wrong because car manufacturers are literally bringing back buttons because of safety and customers like it.

Doug is the kind of guy who wouldn't hit the point if he fell out of a boat in the middle of an ocean filled with the point. No one is saying NO SCREENS. They're saying so putting everything into the screen. Sure, changing the language, put that on your screen. Turning up the temp on your AC? A knob. Use a knob.

Before: Save the manuals! 2024: Save the buttons!!!

TO be honest, the reason car manufacturers put everything on the screens instead of actual physical buttons is not for the sake of aesthetics but rather because it is "cheaper". Unlike physical buttons where you have to make or build them, screens just needs wiring and programming and that is literally it. It's cheaper

I’m an UX Designer who worked in the automotive industry, designing parts of infotainment systems for brands like GM, Ford and Toyota. The car’s cockpit or any hardware interfaces should be a subtle balance of functionality and ease of use. This is achieved through uniform connectedness, chunking (grouping) and intuitive proximity (relation of items between each other). If touch screens in cars would not have existed, car designers would still have the difficult and challenging task of arranging every slider and button in the best possible shape, size and position, considering the very creative space limitation, or reach of hand. And as a result, they would prioritize only the most used and important features, and the driver would be much better off. Not only in tactile enjoyment (which is a thing), but also safety, because buttons are always in the same place you left them. Instead, thanks to Tesla, we started getting everything shoved into a screen, with very bad prioritization, lack of feedback and design guidelines made for laptops and tablets, instead of drivers who should actually look at the road. To me, this is a copout. An easy and cheap way for manufacturers to deliver functionality, instead of challenging themselves at every step, and coming up with better solutions (like heads-up displays) that would actually move the auto engineering forward. So unfortunately, critiquing people who are critiquing touch screens, I think is actually a disservice to the automotive industry, and Doug should know better. Especially as a car enthusiast.