I wish one could have small sliders and buttons along the side edges of the display. I find I can use the bezel as a support for one digit and then use my index finger to press the button. This way I don't bounce around and can hit it accurately.
Hate having to dive into menu to sunroof and suspension controls and then hit small buttons. If you're going to burn the entire screen then make the slider or buttons WAY BIGGER.
A small thing, but hey.
Totally agreed... when you're in a modal dialogue the whole screen can / should be used for interaction that is targeted at ease of use in a moving vehicle with as little eyes off the road as possible. This thing about having to stabilize your hand on the bezel (I do it too!) just so your button finger can zero in on its mark.. is a fail. Make every button 3x taller and 2x wider than a finger so when you hit a bump in the road you still hit the target. I don't care if the car is supposed to be autopiloting in strengthening degrees over time, the driver should always be distracted as little as possible. And roads will always be bumpy.
Climate settings is such a dialog box, and so too the audio balance / equalizer.. These are pop overs that prevent other interaction on the screen so they may as well make the best use of their time because they own you when they're up.
There is so so much room for improvement in Tesla UI designs in this area.
Some things they are attempting to do well... just need a few more details and would be perfected. Take for example sunroof. With this dialog box you can drag the sunroof itself up and down the screen to set the opening amount. That is better than a small dial or button. Could you imagine the stupidity of using up/down arrows controlling a digital wheelbox for % open? Thank goodness we don't do that.
Tesla added a "comfort setting" on the sunroof - spot that is favorable for limiting wind buffeting about 3/4 open. They indicated this by a line on slider control. And they introduced a software "detent" for the line with some increased gravity and snap to this line when you are swiping the slider near there.
Good improvement, I think.
This is a way to add tactile-like features to soft controls on a screen. Take it a tiny bit further for perfection and best you can do... by adding a soft click sound over the speakers when the user has fallen into the detent of the comfort zone. Now, with eyes on road, user can reach and slide the sunroof with peripheral vision into roughly the right spot and hear a click and let go, and know they're good to get a comfort setting.
This idea could be extended to have slightly weaker detents and gravity around several set percentage openings for sunroof. Maybe 20% increments 20/40/60/80/full, or maybe use big data collection and determine where people like to have their sunroofs set and go by that... could be 15/30/60/comfort/max ? So now the user just drags the sunroof and hears a click click click and lets go and knows they have selected 60%. If you want to be ultra choosy and have 49% because only 49% will do, can still do that by slowing your swipe after hearing a couple clicks
then look down to home in on your sweet 49.
..maybe the car starts to know (learn) your favorite hangouts for sunroof and plants detents on your slider only where you like to have it. Saved with your profile. To heck with big data or dumb factory defaults.. these are my zones!!
p.s. you can assign "sunroof opening amount" to a thumbwheel on the steering wheel if that's a feature you use often.. (The idea of having gravity and detents and sound clicks for select positions could also be applied to thumb wheel adjustment of sunroof, not just on-screen adjustments. )
Anyway similar ideas could be extended to many other controls on the screen. And hey, don't be afraid to use color! Everything doesn't need to be blue buttons with tiny fonts. Take an example from seat heaters and defrost, these guys caught onto the idea that "red" means heat... and are not afraid to show that.
It's these things that I would have hoped Tesla would constantly release a few improvements every month or so with their OTA capability. But they save up "huge UI revamps" and x.0 releases that mess with a bunch of stuff in trivial ways and rearrange buttons but don't actually make much true UI usability improvements for the car. ya ya they're busy doing great new things with AP... but seriously, focus a couple people in software on this and let them be to make improvements.
