Buttons are back, baby!

Several years ago, I got a good deal on a Flex 6400 and thought I’d give it a try. It’s a great radio, and I enjoyed using it, but after a couple of years, I decided to give it up and buy an Icom IC-7610 instead. The main reason was the user interface—the IC-7610 has real knobs and buttons instead of just a computer screen to control its functions. Maybe I’m just being old school (I am certainly getting old), but I prefer real knobs and buttons, even if those knobs and buttons are just providing digital inputs to the processor controlling the radio.

Recently, I’ve run across a couple of articles that back me up on this. The first, “Touchscreens are out, and tactile controls are back,” is an interview in IEEE Spectrum with Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, and a leading expert on buttons and how people interact with them.

She says that while touchscreens are a useful interface, people are becoming somewhat fatigued by the use of them. “People seem to have a hunger for physical buttons,” she says, “both because you don’t always have to look at them—you can feel your way around for them when you don’t want to directly pay attention to them—but also because they offer a greater range of tactility and feedback.”

She also said something else I found interesting. “Buttons tend to offer you a really limited range of possibilities in terms of what you can do. Maybe that simplicity of limiting our field of choices offers more safety in certain situations.”

I might say that it also makes the user interface more straightforward and easy to understand and use. Take the receiver incremental tuning (RIT) control, for example. I use this control frequently on my IC-7610, I press a button to turn it on and a knob to set the offset. On the Flex, however, using the SmartSDR software, I’d have to go to the X/RIT menu, click on the RIT button on the screen, then set the offset by clicking right or left arrows or by typing in a text box. It’s just not as simple to do as on the IC-7610, so I found myself using that control less often.

The second article is “Subaru is bringing back physical knobs and buttons in its cars.” The article begins, “To the relief of practically anybody who drives a car regularly, Japanese carmaker Subaru has brought back physical buttons and knobs for its 2026 Outback midsize SUV. It’s yet another sign that carmakers are finally starting to listen, ditching massive touchscreens that have taken over a vast number of vehicle controls in favor of tactile buttons, switches, and knobs.”

Of course, touchscreens are the appropriate choice for many transceiver functions. The IC-7610 touch screen not only displays the waterfall, but also lets you select a signal by touching it on the screen. That works great for me.

The lesson to be learned here is that a good user interface can help increase sales. These days, almost all of the radios from the major manufacturers are so good that the average ham can’t really detect a difference in performance. That leaves the user interface as one of the differentiating features, and you’d think that a more usable user interface would sell more radios. And, it appears that physical, tactile buttons and knobs are going to be a part of that user interface.