Are Physical Buttons And Knobs Making A Comeback?

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. I’ve been shopping for a new car, no longer wishing to own my current EV. So I’ve been test driving others. You know what I’ve noticed? The maddening glass touch screen, which still annoys me after seven years of driving, is giving way in some newer EVs to buttons, yes, actual knobs, that turn buttons, that click. It is Back to The Future. Now, I don’t expect to see my old push button car radio return, but this is close enough.

So why are some car companies turning back from the touch screen? Does it have anything to do somehow with our brains liking to connect to that kind of physical movement? The touch? The feel? Well, here to talk about it are a couple of folks who think about these things. James Forbes is a professor of practice in the Department of Automotive Engineering at Clemson University and was formerly who he spent many decades with Ford Motor Company. Welcome to Science Friday.

JAMES FORBES: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Rachel Plotnick is an associate professor in The Media School at Indiana University in Bloomington and author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. Welcome to Science Friday, Rachel.

RACHEL PLOTNICK: Thank you. Glad to be here.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. James, am I right in feeling that there’s a trend back towards buttons, or is it just in the cars that I’m happening to look at?

JAMES FORBES: Well, there’s been increasing buzz in the media about it. I think that there’s this inherent tension that when you load a vehicle up with tons and tons of features, you end up needing to move away from physical buttons and towards a more reconfigurable touch screen interface. So I think it depends on the segment of the vehicle you’re looking at. I think you’ll have some of the high end EVs will continue to have screens. But Scout Motors, Slate, a couple other new vehicles out there are proposing heavy button interfaces, really.

IRA FLATOW: Is it a fashion thing, or do you say it’s more than that, it’s more ergonomics than just fashion?

JAMES FORBES: Well, I would say that ergonomically, there’s ample data out there to say the physical controls are better. European regulators would agree with that. And just this learned muscle memory of I reach out, I grab something, I twist it, I have the haptic feedback to what I’m doing, that’s always going to be less distracting and more certain with the control. The problem is if I have 100 features in the vehicle, then I can’t have a physical control for all of them.

So if I have to nest the features, then that’s where we end up with touch screens. And there are some European countries that have language laws, so that if I have a touch screen, I can translate the controls to the language of your choice. And I can also get away from some of the cryptic symbols that we put on some of the buttons just due to the size. But in general, I think that ergonomically, it’s clear that physical controls are better.

IRA FLATOW: Rachel, what is it that people find appealing about buttons?

RACHEL PLOTNICK: I think there are a lot of things. One aspect is that touch screens are very flat, and everything feels the same no matter what kind of a push you make. So I often joke that people will tell me they can’t rage poke a touchscreen. It always just feels the same. And as James was mentioning, I think that haptic feedback and being able to feel around and have different kinds of textures, touches, and pushes is very appealing. Additionally to that, when we think about a touchscreen, it really is a visual device. And so when we’re thinking about cars specifically, what do you need to operate a touchscreen? You need your eyes. And that becomes really problematic on the road and that it’s not just about your fingers. It’s really about taking your eyes off of the road.

IRA FLATOW: I can relate to that because I remember when I was studying industrial engineering in college, I recall a class about knobs and buttons and how important it was to vary the shape and the feel of the buttons so you don’t have to take your eyes off the road or the landing strip. And you could feel them with your fingers. Right, James?

JAMES FORBES: Absolutely. And there’s certain very well established paradigms that if I want to increase temperature or increase volume, it’s a very common paradigm to grab something around and twist it clockwise. It’s very intuitive, very low mental energy required to do that.

IRA FLATOW: And you knew, Rachel, that you could have a button within a button like concentric buttons. You knew when– the outside button was for something. And the inside button was for something else.

RACHEL PLOTNICK: Exactly. And I think that speaks to muscle memory that we develop over time, too, that people come to a car. I mean, we’ve all had that feeling of getting in a rental car and feeling like a stranger in a strange land where you’re feeling around trying to figure out the vehicle. But over time, if you get used to that interface, it becomes just second nature. And I think people know, OK, press this twice. Press this once. Turn this dial the same way that you go in your bathroom in the dark in the middle of the night, and you can feel around without ever turning a light on. So I think that variation in button texture, size, pressure, all of those things really play into a feeling of familiarity with buttons.

IRA FLATOW: When you were at Ford, did you spend a lot of time thinking about these things, James? Did people get feedback from the customers?

JAMES FORBES: We did. Yes. And what we found was that it really depends on the specific target customer for a given vehicle. And Ford had quite the range of target customers. If you’re an F-150 driver, then you would value more of a traditional haptic physical interface. So we’d have a lot of hard controls in an F-Series. And if you were looking for a more modern, more complex vehicle, then maybe a Ford Mach-E would rely more on a touch screen.

IRA FLATOW: Rachel, your book is subtitled A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. What do you mean by all of that?

RACHEL PLOTNICK: It’s a lot of P’s. When I wrote the book, I was really interested in the fact that we often tend to talk about buttons in two ways, one, that the pleasure part of it, which is that they tend to be associated with instant gratification and getting whatever we want, whether that’s pushing app buttons on our phones, or social media, or pushing a button to get coffee or turn on your TV. So there’s a lot of pleasure associated with that.

Or there’s a panic that’s commonly thought of about them. Think of the self-destruct or the do not push big red button. People are afraid it’s going to blow up the world or do something terrible. So I found that there was this really long history of social and cultural ideas about pushing a button and that we’ve had a lot of anxieties and hopes at the same time about something that seems, on its surface, a very simple technology, but is actually quite complex.

IRA FLATOW: Is it something that people intuitively understand, or is it something that you really need to learn to use?

RACHEL PLOTNICK: It’s a funny dichotomy, I think. On the one hand, my kids are great at pushing buttons, my buttons, and also physical buttons. But we’ve all seen children who love to open and close the garage door or press every button on the elevator. So in that sense, buttons can seem maddeningly simple. Anyone can push them. They’re very democratic. But on the other hand, I think there is a tremendous amount of complexity to buttons that we often don’t think about. Think about operating a cockpit of an airplane, or DJs who are playing digital music, or having to the right codes to operate something. So I do think that we tend to talk about buttons in a way that’s overly simplistic because we’ve all had that moment of feeling, I don’t which button to push, or I don’t what this button does. And that can be really frustrating as well.

– You know what I have noticed? You talked about elevators, Rachel. I have not seen a glass button in an elevator yet.

RACHEL PLOTNICK: Yeah. I think what started to happen, there have been some elevators where they’re doing basically a control panel on the outside of the elevator. And you’ll call your floor. It basically queues up a lot of people outside the elevator. And then you’ll get in that elevator. And it won’t have any buttons at all. You’ll just be inside an empty steel box. And reports that I’ve seen have suggested people get very anxious about that because there’s this feeling of loss of agency. Oh, my gosh. I’m in this box, and I can’t control it. But I haven’t seen much of a move toward touchscreens and elevators. I think you’re right.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. I’m thinking that people really want that tactile feel of that button press.

RACHEL PLOTNICK: It seems to be something that people really relate to. And in all the work I’ve done and all the interviews I’ve given, it’s amazing how many people will write to me and say, I’m so excited to hear that they’re bringing back buttons. That seems to be a very common sentiment.

IRA FLATOW: James, you touched on this earlier. How much do car makers know about the usability of touchscreens versus other kinds of controls? Are they keeping close track of this?

JAMES FORBES: Yeah. There’s a lot of literature out there that relates to usability of touch screens and physical controls. There’s technical papers. In Europe, there’s a European new car assessment program that’s an industry trade group that has done a lot of their own research. They’re now specifying that vehicles must have hard controls for certain features. And again, that’s not regulatory. But it’s near regulatory if you want a good score on your Euro NCAP test.

IRA FLATOW: And then, of course, we now have in some of our modern cars voice commands that sometimes work. Rachel, do you think that people are going to fight back against voice commands? They still want these buttons to touch?

RACHEL PLOTNICK: That’s a good question. I think I see a mixture. Increasingly, voice technologies have taken hold on our phones and Alexa, Siri, things like that. So it’s becoming a more common technology. But there are plenty of instances that show it’s just not the best way to do things. We especially run into problems when we’re thinking about people’s accents, or if you have a stutter, or you don’t want to have to speak out loud for a particular reason.

So to me, it’s always a mix of controls. I always say to people, I’m not a button evangelist, per se. I don’t romanticize the button as being the right solution for all things. I think it is very context dependent, as James mentioned. And I think– my guess is that we’re always going to see buttons playing a role in some kind of controls, even though people have been imagining the death of the button for the past couple of decades.

IRA FLATOW: James, there’s an idea called cognitive load, how much thought effort it takes to do something. Where are buttons and dials on the cognitive load scale?

JAMES FORBES: Well, because you learn a behavior and you have the tactile feedback, it’s a very low cognitive load for a physical button, whereas if you have a reconfigurable touch screen, then the first thing you have to do is figure out where you are. And then you have to figure out where you want to be. And then you have to get to that new screen. So that’s a higher cognitive load.

IRA FLATOW: So if there’s research saying that a knob or button is more usable, it’s easier to deal with mentally, why do manufacturers still try the screens? I mean, they know this, right?

JAMES FORBES: Yeah. I think it’s that there are a lot of consumers that want more and more content in the vehicle. And at some point, you just run out of real estate for buttons. So you need this reconfigurable screen. And like I said, you can change the language. You can change the layout of the screen. You can have over-the-air updates. You can do a lot. There are some nice things with screens, theoretically, at least. However, if– you can imagine if you were going to a big interview, and you get in your car in the morning, and they decided to reconfigure all your screens, you’re probably not very happy because you’re stressed out already.

IRA FLATOW: Rachel, is it possible to go back in history and to decide where the first button was?

RACHEL PLOTNICK: Oh. I spent so much time trying to answer that question. I really wanted to get to that answer. I never quite got there. I was all the way deep down into belly buttons and clothing buttons. And I never got quite to that very first button that was ever pushed. But we do see starting in the late 1800s around electrification and industrialization, but that’s when the idea of pushing a button and completing an electrical circuit became common.

So some of the earliest buttons involved doorbells, ringing a bell for a servant and then a little bit later, thinking about elevators, and camera buttons, and some of the buttons that we’re still very familiar with today. So I wish I could give you a great answer on that. But I do think that the association between electricity and buttons became important in that now we’re thinking about electricity– people talked of it as this servant that was going to do magical things, which was probably pretty overblown. But we can think of all the conveniences associated with pushing a button and getting what we want today. So those hopes, even back then, I think were pretty founded in where we are today.

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. If you’re just joining us, we’re talking about physical control buttons in cars and other places. Is this an accessibility issue? I mean, are physical controls better for an aging population or people with disabilities?

RACHEL PLOTNICK: I think– James may have a better answer than me. But I do think it does depend a lot, again, on the specific users and depending on disabilities or impairments that a person is facing. In one of my classes, we were learning about video game controls and how a lot of buttons are unpressable for people who don’t have full use of their hands or only use of one hand. But obviously, different kinds of visual impairments or other things may require different solutions. So it doesn’t seem like there’s ever going to be a one size fits all interface. You really do need that kind of configurability.

JAMES FORBES: Yeah. And I think that with age can come peripheral neuropathy and things that make interacting with the touch screen a little more difficult. It’s a little easier to grab something physically and twist it or push it.

IRA FLATOW: So Rachel James, you don’t ever think we’re never going to see a button? They’re not really ever going away, are they?

JAMES FORBES: Well, I think that the greatest threat to physical controls may be automation. So for instance, there are some car makers that would put the windshield wiper controls in a touchscreen. And that would be fine if the wipers worked completely automatically, and whenever you needed them to wipe, they would wipe. And whenever you didn’t want them to wipe, they wouldn’t. But in reality, we don’t have the automation down quite to that level yet. So you’ll go through a car wash. You’ll do things. And you’ll want to override the automation.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. My wipers like to go on even when it’s not raining every now and then.

JAMES FORBES: Right.

RACHEL PLOTNICK: And I think that’s an interesting facet too as we see artificial intelligence and automation coming to cars, that one thing I’ve noticed is that people in some ways might become even hungrier for buttons to that point of I want that agency. Hey, if I’m going to let this car drive me around, then you better believe I want some big red button I can push to stop the car if I want to. And so there may actually be this kind of paradoxical effect where buttons will become even more important as we become more reliant on these automated features.

IRA FLATOW: James, is there a car ergonomics decision you just don’t get, something you wish you could change?

JAMES FORBES: Boy, it’s– because the lineup of vehicles within any manufacturer is so broad, we win some battles. We lose other battles. So I don’t know if you can categorically say there’s a decision that we always lose and we want to win. But I do definitely see the trend towards more of a nostalgic or more of a traditional more of a driving experience type vehicle that would be focused more on hard controls. And I think that would be positive ergonomically.

RACHEL PLOTNICK: There does seem to be this very interesting kind of pendulum swing in terms of what is fashionable over time. And I think you’re absolutely right that nostalgia is a big factor right now to return to these kind of older materials. And it’s funny. With cars, buttons have been super in vogue following World War II, the 1950s, and ’60s. Push button start was the coolest thing you could have. And then that totally died out and fell out of fashion. And we moved to this touch screen mania in the early 2000s. So I do think beyond function, there are these aesthetic and generational things that happen that make different interfaces seem really either very attractive or very out of style.

IRA FLATOW: Thank you, Rachel, for taking time to be with us today.

RACHEL PLOTNICK: My pleasure.

IRA FLATOW: Rachel Plotnick, associate professor in The Media School at Indiana University in Bloomington, author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing. Also, James, thank you for taking time to be with us today.

JAMES FORBES: It was a pleasure. Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: James Forbes is a professor of practice in the Department of Automotive Engineering at Clemson University and formerly with Ford Motor Company. And you listeners, we want to know, what’s the button that you can’t do without? What one button press makes your life better? Leave us a message. 1-877-4SCIFRI. That’s 1-877, the number four, SCIFRI.

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