Hi all,
Today's post is about buttons. Glorious, clicky, tactile buttons. And one man's mission to fix a grievous design error. (Sidebar, if you know anyone who works at Hyundai, send them this post. That's a lot of foreshadowing, so maybe you can see where this is going.)
Anyway, to share some context and make a long story short, my old car was totaled, and I was in the market for a new car.
Of course, car shopping involves reaching an agreement with the chairperson of my senior executive advisor committee, and there are many factors that go into a purchase decision. Other than one sticking point, which brings us here today, we had settled on a vehicle.
And that sticking point was... buttons.
You see, even just a few years ago, the model car we were interested in (and trust me, I looked for used ones and there were none available) had buttons. Wonderful buttons. I mean, just look at these things.
But then, somewhere around 2024-2025, things changed and they replaced all those glorious buttons with a capacitive touch panel.
I mean, it looks cool, but trying to hit one feels like a game of pin the tail on the donkey. Unless you're eyeing it, you have no idea what you've hit. I hang out in some groups with mechanical engineers and industrial designers, and they absolutely HATE touch panels for car interfaces. Dunking on poor interface design is basically a full time hobby for them.
Now, I will say, to Hyundai's credit, these aren't "soft" buttons that can move when an underlying screen changes, so this wouldn't earn the full ire of my design minded peers, but they're still awful. And there are real, physical knobs and clicky buttons immediately adjacent to the touch panel. They're clearly capable of adding physical buttons, so the question is WHY?
Anyway, this was the last sticking point for car shopping, and I thought maybe I could live with it, or potentially fix it, and the chair of my senior executive advisory committee liked the vehicle, so we made the purchase. I've had the car for two months now, and can honestly say, it's still a constant papercut.
Some of my fix ideas involved stick on nubby things, or in an extreme world, ripping out the center console and replacing it with something fully custom. The idea I was most interested in started with a mental picture of an old Apollo instrument console. (I found an actual picture, for reader reference below.) It's got finger guards in between the toggle switches.
I figured a finger guard would provide some feedback as to where my fat sausage fingers were poking, and would be relatively simple to mock up and install.
Of course, when it came time to take measurements to build my CAD model, the panel surface was perfectly flat, with no features to index off of, so you're doing this awkward sort of eyeball thing. Rather than work directly in the car, with knobs and other buttons in the way, (see, they're rubbing it in!) I taped some tracing paper over the dash and copied the buttons with a pencil. A few measurements later and I was spinning CAD.
I printed up a model for a fit check, made some small tweaks to the alignment for a v2, and voila! Tactile feedback! I can feel things. And it's way better.
I can already report a huge improvement in the usability of the panel.
<deep sign of relief>
best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer