Design the interface for functionality not familiarity

This blog post is about touch screen Macs, but I’ll start by talking about touch screen cars. Vehicle manufacturers have increasingly replaced physical controls in cars with touch screens, and it hasn’t gone well, because the touch screens frustrate drivers. As a resident of the Upper Midwest who drives wearing gloves in the winter, I suspect that that the idea for touch screens came from somewhere warmer than the traditional home of the automotive industry, Detroit. For further reading on the serious, indeed dangerous problems with touch screens in cars, I found a couple of recent articles from Popular Mechanics and The Conversation. Smartphones have become ubiquitous, bringing ubiquitous familiarity with touch screen interfaces. Nonetheless, a touch screen is not the best interface for all purposes. In the case of cars, familiarity breeds contempt! The introduction of touch screens to smartphones was inspired by the physical limitations of the devices. The largest iPhone ever made,…