This layout makes sense if you have used an old school mp3 player or similar.
Volume is left and right because it’s an analog of the volume bar on the screen.
Up and down is previous and next because play was controlled by a list UI so you were moving a cursor up and down between songs.
It’s not how I personally would prefer it, but it’s not as outlandish as it seems.
That makes a lot of sense. I still hate it, but i understand the justification for it now.
Probably also matches to a visible screen with track visibility, so up and down is literally moving between tracks
Thank you for making this make more sense.
I still feel like this is sillt… I’ve owned a lot of mp3 players and none of them worked this way. Was this a zune thing or something?
Every mp3 player I owned in the 2000’s worked this way. Screen above, controls below, list UI for tracks, usually volume rocker or dial on top.
Sometimes the UI would be more complicated and would include a left/right button for navigating horizontal menus (like my all time favorite Zen Vision:M) but the basic playlist was still a vertical scrolling list UI.
Hey, at least it’s not a touch screen :)
Nailed it. Even the worst interface with buttons is miles away from the best touchscreen interface. You are like driving, you aren’t supposed to look at the screen and tap things on it to switch a song or whatever. You navigate a missile that weights at least two tones and can undo a crowd of pedestrians or break a wall in a building. You are in no position to focus on this tiny LED that some insane idiot mounted there. Yet, it’s there.
My wife just reminded me that she was asked to take a survey about this car after she bought it.
She complained about these buttons being oriented stupidly, and the survey taker mentioned that this has been a common complaint for years. Nevertheless, BMW / Mini has stayed the course. Users be damned.
Begs the question - what exactly is the survey for, then?
I want to know why do many cars don’t have a play/pause button on the wheel, but do have a source button.
I change my source from my phone exactly never. I want to pause the audio all the time.
bro I swear whoever designs the interfaces in cars must be the CEO’s nephew
My Hundyai has a programmable star button on the steering wheel that can be tied to media on/off.
Kia also.
Fully remappable steering wheel buttons is a great idea.
My Tesla has one, but I haven’t yet figured out what best to do with it. The current leading contender is wipers - auto wipers are not sufficient. Also I hesitate to rely on and get used to primary co trol in custom places
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I’ve been wishing for play pause since audio books and podcasts came into the world. It’s ridiculous that nobody has this button in 2024
My Jeep has it and it’s from 2018.
I change the source regularly between my phone and the radio, but I don’t use any of the wheel buttons, so I’m not even sure if my car has a source button on it.
Ampersands on Lemmy, mildly infuriating
&ersands*
For me they show correctly on Eternity, unless OP has edited them by now. The trick is to use
&, in case anyone is interested.
Wouldn’t it be nice if an engineer had decision making power?
Engineer here. It’s like that because that’s the way it’s always been. To change it would mean retooling silk-screen printing on the D-pad, and changing the wiring underneath. And they probably use this D-pad everywhere, so someone like me will have to talk to someone else like me, and right now I have phone shyness (can’t just be an email, have to call a meeting). I’ll also have to talk to a supplier and get them to change the wiring, and Procurement won’t let me just change anything, because it gives suppliers a chance to requote a job, and they’ll ask for more money. And then I’ll have to talk to Production, because they’ll have to retrain the workers, make sure someone doesn’t stop the line because this new part doesn’t look exactly like the old part. Oh, and Quality of course, need to make sure the inspectors don’t start rejecting the new parts (just kidding, they never look at parts). Then there’s Marketing. Since this is a customer-facing part, definitely need their input. Might have to change catalogs and brochures with new pictures.
No, they just got the good brand of gummy bears in the cafeteria, I’m going to go buy a bag of those, and then fill out these forms my new boss has been asking about. New boss, new forms, same old shit.
Remapping gpio pins doesn’t require changing wiring, but it might require tracking a unique firmware revision.
Sounds like a proper project to me. No wonder companies keep the same stuff for way too long. If it’s not horribly broken and on fire, don’t fix it. Being slightly broken is apparently totally fine though.
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Nothing personal, but that’s bullshit on the company. Rotate the entire assembly 90° to the direction where the next track arrow points right, and counter rotate the ok gel button so that it’s properly up and down. I can’t imagine a silk screen template is that engrained. There might be some mounting screw difference, but adjust that in manufacturing from your parts suppliers. No reengineering of the harness necessary. This is just pure laziness.
that’s the way it’s always been!
You have allready missed details, this would be worse than before.
For two reasons:
The customers who are used to this scheme will have to relearn the button placement, this will generate complaints, so the change will generate bad PR for the brand for years as people upgrade their car and have to relearn the controls.
If we went with your suggestion, the volume buttons would be 90 degrees off.
You mean a designer right? Developers and engineers are the ones making these weird decisions
Managers make weird decisions, engineers and developers just do what they’re told when it comes to user facing experiences.
As an engineer with a boss I really do not like and who makes moronic decisions ALL the time (that I then have to go along with), I agree
Yeah engineer, developer, and designer all give their input. Designer proposal is likely the most user friendly, but, changes come with real tangible engineering / development costs. Manager says “ok stick with what we have, it’s cheaper.”
I’m a software engineer and UX designer.
Being in both those roles can sometimes be incredibly frustrating. Like “yes, this is the best solution for users. It helps dev by being more future proof, using more common patterns with more readily available open source software. It will take considerable dev time so we should do it now rather than later. If we don’t do this now it will just lead to more technical debt and a worse experience”
CTO: “sounds expensive, let’s not do it”
A year later, CTO: “why is this so convoluted? Shouldn’t we have worked on these changes earlier?”
suprised_pikachu.jpg
Same in my 2017 Toyota. Bought it new and trained my brain to use it. Someone finally released a replacement that’s set up correctly, and now I’m relearning the control.
Yeah that was one of the many things that annoyed me in pre-2020 Toyotas, along with the insane baked-in audio delay and the hilariously ridiculous manually-stored images for songs and artists.
Made by people that use a volume slider and swipe for next… Such a horrible design in cars.
Think of it like this. Up arrow is forward and the down arrow is back. The volume then increases from left to right like most linear scales (that aren’t up and down). Yes the buttons should be the other way but there was probably some (poor) reasoning to why they are this way.
As someone mentioned in the comments, it might be because the media is displayed as a vertical list on the car’s display.
Drove a Kia once and it was the same. Up went back a track, down went forwards. Opposite of my intuition.
Current Kia isn’t like this
Preach! When did you ever hear someone say “please turn the volume right” or “can you play the up track”? It drives (NPI) me crazy in my Toyotas!
My VW is this way and it’s infuriating. It drives me nuts that Down is Next, it’s so backwards.
Volume should be up/down, and track left/right.
I’m curious if the left/right would be language dependent? English is left to right, so Right would be Next. Would Hebrew and Arabic be the opposite since they’re right to left languages?
I have my now old VW because their design was so intuitive. Sad how much worse they’ve become in the past 10 years in design and quality
I have only had one car, a 2021 Seat Leon, qnd the media controls are great, but spread out on the steering wheeel…
The volume control is located on the left side, it is a wheel, roll it up, volume goes up, roll it down, volume goes down, push the wheel, and the music is paused. Next/Previous buttons are located on the right side of the steering wheel, works great!
Now, if only it didn’t have touch controls for everything outside the steering wheel…
Oof yes, my Kia ev6 too. Down is next. In my BMW up was next.
It drives me nuts that Down is Next, it’s so backwards.
How is that backwards? If you have music in a playlist in a media player app (or iPod or other MP3 player), the next song is underneath the one you’re currently playing.
Which direction do you move your finger to access the next song on your phone when. Looking at a play list.
Your finger moves up then taps the one you want.
You could just as easily say that next should be up.
Both are wrong.
Next should be left, volume should be up / down.
Down is next because it’s a list of songs with the first song at the top and the last at the bottom.
Frankly it’s the orientation that makes the most sense when you consider it given most people will be listening from a streaming service, but back when CDs were a thing the songs weren’t considered a list but tracks numbered from 1 to n. The up button incremented the track number and so it made sense for up to be next.
Going even further to tapes, fast forward and rewind literally moved the tape left to right/right to left, and so it made sense for them to be right and left respectively, however now it makes less sense other than being what older people are used to
Having grown up in the tape era, the right button being next / fast forward just make sense.
I can see on a screen that you’d scroll down to get to the bottom of a playlist, but isn’t your finger moving up?
This is the classic problem of inverted vertical controls or not?
Just avoid it altogether and make the back / skip button left / right respectively, and volume be up / down which just makes obvious sense.
It’s not scrolling though - using the arrow keys on a keyboard or d-pad on a controller you’d use up to go up and down to go down when navigating documents, menus etc. As far as I’m aware unlike when you’re moving a viewport either by scrolling or in games there’s no debate when it comes to moving a caret.
And as you said, “having grown up in the tape era”. Just because it was logical for that application and so is logical to you doesn’t mean it’s still logical - people who grew up with record players could just as easily argue for two spinning knobs as you’re moving a potentiometer to increase/decrease the volume, and spinning the record forward/back; having grown up in the CD era I had both of them being up/down or left/right as the buttons were either beneath or either side of the slot/hatch most of the time, same with tv remotes having both as up/down, and given there was no standard then I don’t think either one “just makes sense”
Clearly you’re meant to have the car on its side before playing any media
True. On its left side.
Well it is a Japanese car, and they drive on the left side in Japan
British car
The up and down are used to go up and down in menus lists. It matches the animations as well. It would be infuriating if those buttons were on the horizontal.
Hmmm but I think volume up and down, selection left and right are age old. And you shouldn’t look at the screen anyway
For sure, most screens in cars are dangerously implemented. My 2015 Mini has a transparent HUD so I don’t have to look away from the road. No touchscreen either. Long live tactile interfaces in cars.
So what you’re saying is, drivers should take their eyes off the road to look at a list of songs on a screen? Sounds like another horrible design decision.
You don’t have to look at the car’s main media screen. A simplified list UI is replicated onto a small window that temporarily shows up next to the speedometer.
The expectation for everything is to only use the screen when you’re stopped, plus how else would you navigate a menu? Memorize it?
This is a Mini Cooper steering wheel.
