What happened to the field of ergonomics? Why is the modern/digital world so disconnected from the human form and the way people actually work and use things?
Modern electronics is rife with this shitty ergonomics, it's everywhere—from rotten screen GUIs (or GUIs that change with every release—witness Microsoft Windows) to pushbutton volume controls with little or no tactile feedback instead of proper rotary potentiometers, and so on.
I know in many instances it's cheaper but a rotary potentiometer is cheaper than a screen. A rotary knob for a volume control is much easier to use—and much safer too when used in a vehicle.
I've come to the conclusion that designers of digital electronics simply don't know enough about analog electronics and or analog interfaces to design the stuff, it seems the word 'analog' has been stricken from their vocabulary, and or they're too timid to attempt such designs. Perhaps they're frightened of being criticized by colleagues who are even more stupid than they are.
What else can it be? The human hand is exquisitely designed to rotate a knob (evolution suggests we humans evolved thus to twist fruit off trees).
Same issue with pushbutton switches, without decent tactile feedback one's never sure if the function has been completed. Gamers use proper mechanical switch keyboards because they can achieve much, much greater speed and precision than they can with this crappy 'lifeless' stuff.
The modern electronic junk is just so much harder to use, product design has actually gone backwards. The ergonomics of old-fashioned radios and HiFis were perfect in this regard with their rotary potentiometers and clunky switchs.
If you are a designer of this junk and reading this then shame on you! Ask yourself why the hell are you so incompetent that you cannot give users designs that they both want and are easy to use.
Purely analogue controls like potentiometers went out of fashion because controlling for things like judder, slight creep, dead-zones, and of course physical wear and tear were big enough problems. Case in point: even the cheapest new joysticks for flight simulators have moved to Hall effect sensors, and many knobs have moved to rotary detented encoders.
This change happened in real jet airliners too. A press of the rudder pedal or a swing of the joystick/yoke no longer directly pulls on cables and pulleys to directly manipulate control surfaces. Instead, nearly all modern jet airliners use fly-by-wire where control deflections are encoded, and sent digitally to hydraulic actuators on control surfaces.
Hence, UX designers and engineers could still make analogue-like controls with switches, knobs, physical push-buttons, etc and still have a digital back-end. In fact this is exactly what car manufacturers did in the mid-2000s to late 2010s, with the CAN bus and all. Controls were physical, but a shift of the knob to the previous or next detent would trigger an electromagnetic switch of some sort to send a digital signal instead of relying on the physical position of the knob.
I'd say ~2020 and the W223 Mercedes-Benz S-class was the turning point for extravagantly and pointlessly large screens in cars.
Coming in late, but I have an idea about "What else can it be?"
It lets them compress the development timeline. With a potentiometer you need to figure out where it's going to go, how to install it, how to replace it, etc.
With a digital screen, the hardware design is "screen goes here", and most of the hardware issues are moved to the screen manufacturer, while the presentation layer can be changed whenever, and even updated after the car is sold.
This also means less testing is needed, since any major oops can be done with a software patch, which is cheaper than a hardware fix.
What happened to the field of ergonomics? Why is the modern/digital world so disconnected from the human form and the way people actually work and use things?
Modern electronics is rife with this shitty ergonomics, it's everywhere—from rotten screen GUIs (or GUIs that change with every release—witness Microsoft Windows) to pushbutton volume controls with little or no tactile feedback instead of proper rotary potentiometers, and so on.
I know in many instances it's cheaper but a rotary potentiometer is cheaper than a screen. A rotary knob for a volume control is much easier to use—and much safer too when used in a vehicle.
I've come to the conclusion that designers of digital electronics simply don't know enough about analog electronics and or analog interfaces to design the stuff, it seems the word 'analog' has been stricken from their vocabulary, and or they're too timid to attempt such designs. Perhaps they're frightened of being criticized by colleagues who are even more stupid than they are.
What else can it be? The human hand is exquisitely designed to rotate a knob (evolution suggests we humans evolved thus to twist fruit off trees).
Same issue with pushbutton switches, without decent tactile feedback one's never sure if the function has been completed. Gamers use proper mechanical switch keyboards because they can achieve much, much greater speed and precision than they can with this crappy 'lifeless' stuff.
The modern electronic junk is just so much harder to use, product design has actually gone backwards. The ergonomics of old-fashioned radios and HiFis were perfect in this regard with their rotary potentiometers and clunky switchs.
If you are a designer of this junk and reading this then shame on you! Ask yourself why the hell are you so incompetent that you cannot give users designs that they both want and are easy to use.