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.
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.
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.
Yet one more item in an endless exhibit of how mankind is unable to standardize anything at all. Get TWO engineers together to agree on ONE standard plug and the assholes will come out with THREE separate plugs, completely non-compatible with each other, of course.
It’s almost like a miracle that we got the world to agree on certain things like time and timezones, a system of coordinates, the metric system.
All of them received initial pushback, and some to this day. Noisy, noisy fucking humans.Did you know that for a few decades, every town in the UK kept two different times on adjacent clocks? Back when their railway grid was expanding everywhere. Local time and London time.
Funny enough, it’s not the engineers that are doing it. Left to their own devices without ridiculous constraints like “someone else is doing it this way so we need you to do something that sets us apart” or “you can’t look at what everyone else is doing”, engineers will do it the laziest way they can… By copying what others are doing and essentially making it standard.
Yeah usually when engineers take extra effort to do something non-standard, it’s at a specific request from a client or management
The speak-button looks like a farting stick-figure.
Drove a Kia once and it was the same. Up went back a track, down went forwards. Opposite of my intuition.
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.
