It doesn’t matter what you “shouldn’t” do when it comes to mass-market consumer devices. It only matters what people will do, especially when you share a road with them. And when it comes to vehicle interfaces, you should assume 80% of drivers will adjust them during a drive, no matter how inconvenient and dangerous is. Any system that doesn’t recognize this reality — and try to minimize the harm if it — is just going to get people killed.

I understand the thought, but in the real world this is counterproductive and dangerous.

Some interfaces it’s pretty clear that they are best served by physical buttons, toggles, switched, etc. Blinkers, gear selector, volume, windows, for example.

Some interfaces it’s equally clear that they are best served by touch. Text input through an on screen keyboard obviously beats a scroll wheel to select individual letters. Likewise panning and zooming a map.

Now, whether some of these interfaces are being operated while parked or driving is actually a completely separate matter. As you note, any touch feature can be dynamically locked out from operating while in drive. But to answer that question you can’t take the position of a nanny chastising a child. You have to take a holistic view of what actual users in the real world will do based on your decisions.

So, navigation is a great example. People need to navigate while driving. Sometimes that means interacting with the navigation interface while under way, whether it’s due to updating a route, checking for traffic, zooming in and out. As much as you might like to, car designers don’t get to choose whether drivers are going to do this activity while driving. They can provide an interface that is as safe and convenient as possible, or drivers will just use their phones instead.

Every car nav system I ever used, including fairly recent Audi and Mercedes ones, that depended on physical buttons for input was universally terrible. So bad that it wasn’t worth using and so the phone was used instead.

Compared to the Tesla Model 3 nav system which is fully touch, highly responsive, and beautifully rendered. It is a total joy to use and increases overall safety through large touch affordances which make sense for the driving environment. And it’s so easy to activate I almost always have my destination plugged in, which means the car is showing me upcoming traffic and helping me avoid accidents through alternate routes, which is also increasing safety and decreasing overall traffic congestion.

> You shouldn't be doing anything like that while driving.

What does that have to do with anything? The touchscreen controls for most of that aren't even enabled when driving.

But on the Mazda you can't even do these things with the touchscreen while NOT driving.

navigation was just an example. Angdthere is no place here for muscle memory. Do you want to switch radio station? (I hope I can do such thing during driving?). Look at screen where is focus now and rotate the wheel by some angle which depends on what you see on screen. Press the wheel, rotate the wheel again to select another radio station, press it again.

Things like that. Maybe after few years you will memorize parts of this.

I am not telling resignation from touchscreens is bad. Just Mazda didn't offer anything useful instead of it.

Just don't use navigation guy, memorize the paper map! /s

Voice input in cars is the worst idea I've ever seen. I've had a brand new Mercedes with the MBUX interface and extensively used Android Auto, and the voice commands just don't work. Half the time I'm sitting there repeating myself like an absolute idiot because the car completely misunderstood what I mean(yes car, "Navigate to Cramlington" totally means "Navigate to Boston, US"). I have so many horror stories of android Auto getting stuff wrong it's almost funny. And then it's just made worse when you are bilingual - voice interfaces suuuuck at working with two languages at once. Try saying "call Szczepańska" - guaranteed it won't work. Then try getting it to read a message in any language that isn't English - it's just garbled nonsense. My favourite one was when my wife sent me a link to something and Android Auto started reading the link out ....as H T T P colon slash slash W W W dot......what sort of madness is this. Who would ever want this crap in their car is beyond me.

Maybe that's a particular Swiss problem, but I suspect it's actually the case in many regions (as strong local accents are a thing): I've never seen voice input that works for place names. My current car has pretty recent technology and its voice input is great for calling someone from address book, it can even understand Japanese names. But Swiss place names? Forget it, it's impossible for the standard German interface to pick that stuff up correctly, and I'm trying to speak in the most accent-free way I can manage.

Which doesn’t really work when you have screaming children (or adults) in the car.

Incidentally, that was the aspect of old feature phones I most miss today. I could operate them without looking by muscle memory - and it worked because the UI was fixed, but more importantly, it was soft-real time: the delays were predictable and you could learn them too. Today's touch devices tend to lag completely randomly.

People do, because they can. It doesn't matter whether they should or not.

When you design something, you don't design for ideal use, you design to eliminate risky misuse. This is a core axiom of user interface design. It's not good enough to just slap a warning disclaimer on it, as the designer, you're still liable.

I would have my engineering licence revoked if I ignored possible avenues of misuse, could design them out but didn't, and then ended up in court because they misused it and someone died. This isn't a hypothetical, this is how it works in the non-software world where engineering decisions can routinely kill people.

I think it's an easy cop out to say, "Doing literally anything other than focusing exclusively on the task of driving is not worth talking about."

The reality is, people will be adjusting their radios while they drive. They will be looking for open restaurants, changing their destination, and a number of other things while driving, and pretending like they're not worth accommodating ignores some very fundamental principles on the topic of economics.

I don't think that solves the issue.

whether you're looking down or forward, you're spending your attention looking at the HUD, not the road or any other sensor.

Mazda has shortcut buttons as well. See: third image in the article. Their UI is very similar to BMW.

No, they didn't change it. Buttons are slightly re-arranged, but they're still there. See the 3rd pic in the article.