Study finds that buttons are safer and more efficient than touchscreens in cars

Surprise, surprise (heavy sarcasm there), a Swedish study found that touchscreens in cars are less safe and less efficient than good ol' physical buttons. In their test, they found that the best modern car took 40% longer to perform the same tasks as a car with buttons. The worst took over 100% longer. The test involved drivers cruising down an empty airstrip at 68 miles per hour and completing four infotainment tasks, ranging from adjusting the AC to messing with the radio. The Swedish magazine found that the 2005 Volvo, their test car with buttons, far outperformed the modern, infotainment screen equipped cars, with a driver completing all four tasks in just ten seconds and 1,000 feet traveled. The best time in the modern cars (Great news, its the Dacia Sandero) was nearly 14 seconds but that was an outlier because the majority of infotainment equipped vehicles took well over 20 seconds and at least 2,000 feet. The worst was the MG Marvel R, which took a whopping 44.92 seconds.

https://www.vibilagare.se/nyheter/physical-buttons-outperform-touchscreens-new-cars-test-finds#vote

I would imagine multi-function touch screens are cheaper. One giant "button" that does almost everything.  This became inevitable when back-up cameras and the resulting displays became mandated. 

WAG: voice-commands will be the next development. 

Several years back I was at a supplier and they were demonstrating touch screens with haptic, meaning a feedback vibration localized to an area of the screen that helped you determine where the buttons were by touch.   It was interesting stuff, but still in the R&D phase.  That was about 2017?  So its likely coming soon or already on the expensive cars and will get cheaper and read across over time. 

I do agree though, they do take longer and we are doing more and more to distract drivers from driving.  

And over the entire 44.92 seconds in the MG Marvel R your frustration levels are rising until they reach a crescendo and you're ready to put a fist through your car's dash. It's not just time and attention it's also a constant annoyance to deal with these awful menu systems while driving.

@Ian: The voice commands are also terrible, because - at least in the ones I've used - they are just voice control over the menus instead of a separate natural language control system. So instead of a Siri-like "turn the temperature up to 73 degrees," it's "menu - pause - climate control - pause - temperature - pause - up." That is not better. I hope the natural language stuff makes its way in, it's really the only way that voice commands would be an improvement.

In reply to dculberson :

The voice command in the Touareg is awful to the point of uselessness. It's faster to pull over and sort through it manually. 

Thank God the climate control is knobs and buttons and I seldom use the radio. 

Duh! 

dculberson said:

And over the entire 44.92 seconds in the MG Marvel R your frustration levels are rising until they reach a crescendo and you're ready to put a fist through your car's dash. It's not just time and attention it's also a constant annoyance to deal with these awful menu systems while driving.

I imagine if you own an MG Marvel R, you're mood is always a state of constant annoyance.

The voice commands are also terrible, because - at least in the ones I've used - they are just voice control over the menus instead of a separate natural language control system. So instead of a Siri-like "turn the temperature up to 73 degrees," it's "menu - pause - climate control - pause - temperature - pause - up." That is not better. I hope the natural language stuff makes its way in, it's really the only way that voice commands would be an improvement.

Voice recognition is also still not fully fledged. Any time I have to use the Onstar voice commands, I find myself repeating things over and over, enunciating as clearly as possible, and it still gets it wrong.

Didn't BMW try gesture controls? Were they as much an unmitigated disaster as the concept seems? 

Our 2017 Volvo has a small screen but most of the controls are buttons.  Our 2019 Volvo has mostly touch screen, with a few key buttons.

It's definitely the 80/20 rule in action.  You use 20% of the controls 80% of the time, and those are easier with physical controls.

Setting the 2019's temperature and HVAC on the touch screen isn't heinous, but it isn't better.  It's a single extra tap to bring up the HVAC menu, but then it is pretty much just as clear and easy.  Both are pretty easy via voice command, at least to set temperature.

One annoyance is the heated steering wheel / heated seat control, and to be fair, I don't know if the buttons in the 2017 are programmed this way either:

Each control has Hi-Med-Lo-Off temperature setting, and you repeatedly push the button to cycle through them.  In my old E46 you could just hold the button in for 3 seconds and it would turn everything off, but with the Volvo you have to tap-tap-tap through until they are off - twice if you are running the steering wheel and seats.  But this is a programming miscue, not necessarily directly related to the touch screen.

[edit]

Both have steering wheel audio controls, which pretty much handle everything except source switching.  That also isn't difficult via touch screen.

Programming the navigation on either car is difficult, and nearly impossible via voice command.

Praise the Lord!  Now lets get the manufacturers to retroactively tear out all those goofy touchscreen dashes and replace them with good old buttons!

I will say, in this age of stored driver preference profiles, etc - setting the 'deep state' options for all the background stuff is much easier on the 2019's iPad-sized touchscreen than it is with the 2017's small screen and menu control wheel.

I may have missed it in the article, but were these cars that the subjects owned themselves or random people, random cars?

My Toyobaru has an aftermarket touchscreen head unit with a row of buttons along the bottom of the screen for common menu navigation/task switching functions, it also works with the steering wheel buttons for audio control, plus buttons on the touchscreen appear directly above the physical buttons so you can find them without looking, it's a pretty good setup by modern standards.

In reply to iansane :

It doesn't say. I have to assume they aren't. So, yes, with familiarity with the vehicles as you owned them longer would improve those numbers (provided you owned the MG Marvel R long enough to get familiar and didn't stuff it into a tree while spending 45 seconds working the HVAC). But I suspect, some of those wouldn't ever match the numbers, in my opinion. As a somewhat related example, when I had a pushbutton flip phone, I could text without ever looking at the screen and send huge paragraphs of text that were perfectly spelled. I've had a smart phone for 5 years now, and attempts to text without looking at the screen result in a garbled mess.

A great comparo is to drive my 2013 Kia Soul (physical buttons) and my 2013 BRZ (aftermarket touch screen radio). 

The soul has a knob and steering wheel volume control.  Its easy and second nature.  The BRZ has a tiny up/down volume increment buttons that are hard to press and have to be hammered repeatedly to properly adjust the volume.  The difference between just this element between the two cars is night and day.

I remember a text book used back in college (Applied Experimental Psychology: Human Factors in Engineering Design - 1949) which documented the studies done, largely circa WW-II, on controls and instrument panels on tanks, aircraft, etc. The military was taking farm boys and sticking them into 400mph planes. This book covered issues like digital vs analog, readout location and orientation, colors, etc. The menu based screens we see today are not usable in a moving vehicle and reaction times/accuracy are miserable.

This is no surprise and this was figured out LONG ago. Automotive interior designers never seem to learn. My Mini Cooper is amazing on some issues like pedal feel and steering feedback but the instrument panel is a touch-screen nightmare.

What's next? A study to determine the wetness of water?

I'm in a Mazda CX-30 rental this week..  Really happy to have knobs and buttons for everything, despite the large screen.   Rapidly got familiar with everything in the car.  Everything falls to hand and just seems to work.  Knobs people!  Knobs work.

I freaking hate screens in cars.  When they were new, novel, and high-end, it was cool.  Now, I wish the backup cam was integrated into the gauge pod or mirror and there were no screen at all.  

I like buttons better than touchscreens.  I like touchscreens better than cars that force you to use a control wheel and buttons to navigate options on a screen.  My Miata's touchscreen forces you to use the control wheel above 5mph to navigate the menus, which I deplore.  I can see the option I want RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME and I have to have my eyes on the screen for five seconds to navigate the cursor onto the option.  It seems to be the result of what happens when lawyers, accountants and marketing people tell the engineers how to do their job and the engineers just go along with it.

In case anyone missed it, here are the tasks:

• Activate the heated seat, increase temperature by two degrees, and start the defroster.
• Power on the radio and adjust the station to a specific channel (Sweden’s Program 1).
• Reset the trip computer.
• Lower the instrument lighting to the lowest level and turn off the center display.

I'd really like to see a flow chart of what's involved in some of these in all tested vehicles and how much of it is interface design and not just "buttons". The radio test, for example. Was the radio station already programmed into memory? If so, did the user already know? How many of the vehicles chosen had permanent icons for the tasks required and what tasks required entering a menu structure onscreen?

Did they test more than one car with physical controls, and were the tests defined before that vehicle was chosen?  As noted, were the drivers equally familiar with all vehicles? The drivers must have known the tasks ahead of time because using a fresh driver for each test gets into all sorts of experiment control problems.

olpro said:

I remember a text book used back in college (Applied Experimental Psychology: Human Factors in Engineering Design - 1949) which documented the studies done, largely circa WW-II, on controls and instrument panels on tanks, aircraft, etc. The military was taking farm boys and sticking them into 400mph planes. This book covered issues like digital vs analog, readout location and orientation, colors, etc. The menu based screens we see today are not usable in a moving vehicle and reaction times/accuracy are miserable.

This is no surprise and this was figured out LONG ago. Automotive interior designers never seem to learn. My Mini Cooper is amazing on some issues like pedal feel and steering feedback but the instrument panel is a touch-screen nightmare.

Yeah, a valuable takeaway from this study would be how to improve the touchscreen interfaces. Buttons are just a physical thing, and not really any different than a permanent icon placed at the edge of a screen where it can easily be located. If they'd just done the same test with the V70 interface replicated on a screen, that would have given interesting results.

Just turning this into "screens bad, buttons good" throws away a bunch of potentially interesting and useful info.

These two posts back to back made me laugh, because it's the same system. 

Tyler H said:

I'm in a Mazda CX-30 rental this week..  Really happy to have knobs and buttons for everything, despite the large screen.   Rapidly got familiar with everything in the car.  Everything falls to hand and just seems to work.  Knobs people!  Knobs work.

ShinnyGroove (Forum Supporter) said:

I like buttons better than touchscreens.  I like touchscreens better than cars that force you to use a control wheel and buttons to navigate options on a screen.  My Miata's touchscreen forces you to use the control wheel above 5mph to navigate the menus, which I deplore.  I can see the option I want RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME and I have to have my eyes on the screen for five seconds to navigate the cursor onto the option.  

Keith Tanner said:

If they'd just done the same test with the V70 interface replicated on a screen, that would have given interesting results.

An interesting parallel here is:  use a (small) physical keyboard, then use one on an iPad.  Same button layout and approaching similar physical size, but one is touch screen, one is not.  Or even use one of these  https://www.amazon.com/AGS-Wireless-Projection-Bluetooth-Smartphone/dp/B00MR26TUO/

Try to compose a sentence from memory, then try to copy text from elsewhere.

In reply to dculberson :

That's why I said "development" - I know there have been attempts, but I haven't heard of anyone getting it even close yet.

ProDarwin said:

Keith Tanner said:

If they'd just done the same test with the V70 interface replicated on a screen, that would have given interesting results.

An interesting parallel here is:  use a (small) physical keyboard, then use one on an iPad.  Same button layout and approaching similar physical size, but one is touch screen, one is not.  Or even use one of these  https://www.amazon.com/AGS-Wireless-Projection-Bluetooth-Smartphone/dp/B00MR26TUO/

Try to compose a sentence from memory, then try to copy text from elsewhere.

It's not quite the same, because you are trying to maintain the same position of your fingers for an extended period of time and you're using the tactile feedback to do that. When interacting for a vehicle, it's usually just a short one or two press. A closer parallel would be to say "press G and A on the keyboard".

I agree that touch typing is easier on a small keyboard than an iPad, but I don't find my hands drifting too much with the iPad and I can usually manage it.

Keith Tanner said:

ProDarwin said:

Keith Tanner said:

If they'd just done the same test with the V70 interface replicated on a screen, that would have given interesting results.

An interesting parallel here is:  use a (small) physical keyboard, then use one on an iPad.  Same button layout and approaching similar physical size, but one is touch screen, one is not.  Or even use one of these  https://www.amazon.com/AGS-Wireless-Projection-Bluetooth-Smartphone/dp/B00MR26TUO/

Try to compose a sentence from memory, then try to copy text from elsewhere.

It's not quite the same, because you are trying to maintain the same position of your fingers for an extended period of time and you're using the tactile feedback to do that. When interacting for a vehicle, it's usually just a short one or two press. A closer parallel would be to say "press G and A on the keyboard".

I agree that touch typing is easier on a small keyboard than an iPad, but I don't find my hands drifting too much with the iPad and I can usually manage it.

Oh I agree its not exactly the same, its just an interesting exercise.

Like a car though, I want to be able to operate something without having to look at it.  In fact, I often do when I am sitting in my sim rig.  I just need to reach my keyboard to change the view, toggle on driver names, etc.  It is very similar to "press G and A on the keyboard".  It would be interesting to do the exact same test with a iPad.

When your hands don't drift using an iPad, can you look away from the device while typing?  Thats the part I can't do.  And in a car I like to look at the road in front of me :)

I wonder how many similar tests have been done by OEMs but in their decision matrix cost outweighed user experience by a significant margin.