No more touch screens. Even Apple is bringing back the buttons.

Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming more and more features onto screens that can be touched and swiped. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics.

In cars, the widely imitated ultra-minimalism of Tesla’s touchscreen-centric control panels is giving way to actual buttons, knobs and switches in new models including Kia, BMW Mini and Volkswagen. This trend delights reviewers and makes the showy interiors of Tesla and its imitators seem passé.

Similar button changes are happening in everything from e-readers to induction cookers.

Perhaps the most significant representative of the button boom is the company that introduced us to touchscreens in the first place. After introducing the feature on upscale iPhone Apple Watch Ultra and Pro models over the past few years, Apple has added a third button, which it calls the “action button,” to the full lineup of new iPhone 16s unveiled this month. a button-like “camera control” input on the side of the iPhone.

As Apple shows, companies aren’t just reinventing buttons, they’re also reinventing them. Camera controls include touch capabilities, and the company also developed a “force sensor” that makes the AirPods respond to pressure on their stems.

Engineers and industrial designers – often prompted by user complaints – take advantage of our extremely sensitive sense of touch and spatial awareness, known as proprioception. All of this is intended to make gadgets easier, more fun, and in some cases, safer to use. We want to touch and control the cruise control without taking our eyes off the road.

Why buttons became sensors

To understand why buttons are making a comeback in a world where arbitrary control is possible, it’s worth understanding how we got to the current, often pathetic state of human-machine interfaces.

Touchscreens have their advantages, which explains the initial enthusiasm for them. We can do so much more by touching our iPhones than we ever could with the old BlackBerry, no matter how much we miss those clicky little keyboards.

But as rising production has driven down the price of such displays, they’ve become something of a mainstay for gadget designers and corporate bean counters.

“Now that touchscreens are the cheapest option, they’re being installed everywhere, even where they shouldn’t be,” says Sam Calisch, CEO of Copper, a startup that makes induction cookers. In electric stoves and ovens, this has led to poor design decisions — for example, touch-controlled induction cooktops that stop working when the pot comes to a boil, as my Wall Street Journal colleague Nicole Nguyen lamented last year.

Even if our devices have buttons, too often they are as flat as touchscreens and have similar drawbacks. Capacitive buttons are placed flush with hard surfaces and do not budge when pressed, so they can only indicate that they have been activated by sound or light. These have also gained popularity because they are cheap and easy to build into circuit boards already found in gadgets, while using physical switches means additional wiring and complexity, Calisch says.

Anyone who has experienced the ordeal of having to press a capacitive button on a newer washer, dryer or dishwasher knows how extremely irritating such cost-cutting measures – masquerading as futuristic interfaces – can be.

Threats of “touch” interfaces.

Basically, the problem with touch interfaces is that they are not touch-based at all because you have to look while using them. Think, for example, of your smartphone screen, which requires your undivided gaze when you press its smooth surface.

As a result, “touchscreen” is a misnomer, says Rachel Plotnick, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the 2018 book “Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing.” The definitive history of buttons. Such interfaces might be more accurately described as “vision-based,” he says.

The dangers of hiding many vehicle controls in touchscreen menus that drivers must look at have become so obvious that Europe’s only automotive safety authority has stated that vehicles must be equipped with physical switches and buttons to achieve the highest safety rating . In response to criticism from drivers, Volkswagen has pledged to restore physical controls for some frequently used features such as air conditioning.

The newer BMW Mini electric vehicles are bristling with physical controls. So that drivers never have to take their eyes off the road, Mini industrial designers have included a user-customizable head-up display in their vehicles, which drivers can navigate using buttons and a scroll wheel on the steering wheel, says Patrick McKenna, head of product and marketing at Mini USA. These controls can also be accessed via the vehicle’s circular touchscreen or via a voice assistant. The essence of vehicle interfaces is redundancy, safety and limiting distractions, he adds.

Satisfying switches and clicky keyboards

The return to physical interfaces is also, in many respects, climate change. In the era of the ubiquity of touch screens, what was once considered luxurious is becoming tacky. The physical controls, well crafted, now signal the kind of thoughtfulness and exclusivity that came with the original iPhone.

Take the copper induction range knobs. Made of walnut, they allow cooks to know, without looking, the heat level to which the burner has been set – just like physical knobs on a gas stove. This is intentional, says Calisch, who admits that he has included capacitive touch sensors in other electronic devices he has designed in the past.

Physical control is effective in part because of our sixth sense, called proprioception. Unlike the sense of touch, proprioception describes our innate awareness of where our body parts are. This allows us to know the location of all our limbs in three-dimensional space, down to the exact position of our fingertips.

Creating good physical interfaces is not just about the utility of engaging the sense of touch; the great comeback is also a joy. Think of the satisfying weight of a volume knob on a hi-fi stereo, or how the right ergonomic keyboard can make typing less strenuous.

A good example of this sense of play is the hand crank on the side of the Playdate handheld video game system, which also includes the familiar plus-shaped D-pad and two buttons. Putting a controller that works like the crank of an old coffee grinder on a gadget that resembles the original Gameboy is a whim, but it also introduces new game mechanics that would otherwise be cumbersome or even impossible on other devices, says Greg Maletic, director of special projects at Panic, the company that produces Playdate .

Makers of musical instruments have always understood the importance of physical control. Teenage Engineering, Panic’s Swedish consumer electronics company that Panic collaborated with to create Playdate, produces a variety of synthesizers bristling with a dizzying array of buttons, sliders and knobs.

Once you know what to look for, it becomes clear that this kind of design thinking is popping up everywhere, and that adding physical controls back to a device shamefully devoid of them can unlock new kinds of interactions and usability.

E-readers have started adding page-turn buttons. While Amazon has ditched such buttons on its Kindles, competitors from Kobo, Nook and Boox now offer models that include them.

Similarly, Apple – whose 2007 launch of the iPhone ushered in the touchscreen era – is adding a surprising variety of buttons back to devices that previously seemed on the path to not having them.

It brought back physical function keys to MacBook Pro keyboards in 2021, after replacing them, to much fanfare, in 2016 with a touchscreen bar advertised as the Touch Bar. Apple boasted that bringing back physical keys brought back “the familiar, tactile feel of mechanical keys that professional users love.”

The push to re-physicalize interfaces has even led to an unexpected sideline involvement from Dr. Plotnick, an academic authority on buttons. Companies ask her to consult on improving physical controls. In essence, these consultations – which include advising on the potentially life-saving features of buttons on medical devices – aim to make interactions with machines less intimidating and more intuitive.

“You know, pushing buttons often takes a lot of skill, even though it seems like the simplest thing in the world,” he says.