Touch Buttons Are Terrible, Companies Need to Stop Putting Them on Everything

howtogeek.com:

Capacitive touch buttons trade usability for reliability, but I’m not convinced that’s a price worth paying considering the myriad of problems they introduce.

The Problem With Capacitive Touch Buttons

Two things around the house routinely make me reach for the swear jar: cables and touch buttons. Cables are an unavoidable fact of life, the bane of anyone who appreciates a nice clean setup. But touch buttons are a deliberate choice.

To start with, they’re unreliable. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. There’s often no feedback, especially if the device has no speaker. Even if I manage to perfectly mash the smooth indistinct surface with my clumsy digits, I often have no idea if my attempt was a success. In some instances, this can be dangerous.

If you’ve got wet hands, forget about it. If your hands are slightly damp, you’re rolling the dice on a 50-50 chance of success. If the button gets wet, who knows what will happen? Sometimes you don’t need moisture for these buttons to behave erratically, they just go haywire.

Perhaps the most egregious thing is how these buttons can feel unnecessary. Where a regular clicky button or dial would have done the job just fine, a touch button feels shoe-horned in. It can seem like a lazy attempt to make an interface feel modern, a “great idea” suggested by someone who knows nothing about usability in a board meeting about sales projections.

Capacitive Touch Buttons Are Everywhere

There was a period in the late 2010s when touch buttons seemed to appear on almost everything, whether their use was justified or not. Though some manufacturers have moved away from the practice, others seem to be shoehorning capacitive panels into anything and everything.

Electric vehicle manufacturers seem to love touch interfaces, despite the issues created in doing so. These buttons depend on flat smooth surfaces and provide relatively little feedback. It’s easy to turn a dial in the center console when you want to change the air