Bring Back The Buttons

Wearing an Apple Watch for years meant I never really thought about how I interacted with it. You just tap and swipe and it becomes second nature, until you start running and realise how badly that falls apart. Trying to skip a track, check a split, or adjust anything mid-run means jabbing at a small screen that may or may not register the input, hunting through menus that were clearly designed for someone sitting still. When I switched to a Garmin the difference was immediate, physical buttons I could find by feel, press without looking down, working every single time regardless of sweat or cold. It sounds like an absurdly low bar, and it is.

Buttons are not a concession to people who hate progress. They are the right tool for situations that require speed, reliability in poor conditions, and operation without your full visual attention. Muscle memory is the entire point. After a few weeks with a watch that has actual buttons, reaching for the right one without breaking stride becomes completely automatic in a way that poking at a touchscreen never manages. The Apple Watch Ultra is genuinely impressive hardware and for daily use I always understood the appeal, but on a run in January wearing gloves it becomes an expensive problem strapped to your wrist.

The same pattern has been playing out in cars for years, at a much more dangerous scale. My new car has touch controls on the steering wheel and adjusting the heating requires a swipe, which sounds minor until you are actually driving and realise you have to take your eyes off the road to do something you used to do without thinking. Manufacturers stripped out physical controls one by one and replaced dashboards with large touchscreens, presumably because it looked clean at a motor show and saved money on production. Volkswagen’s design boss has since admitted this was a mistake and confirmed they are bringing physical buttons back, and Hyundai ran focus groups that found people get genuinely stressed when they cannot control something quickly. Euro NCAP is updating its safety ratings from 2026 to penalise cars that bury critical controls in touch menus, after research showed that completing basic tasks via touchscreen distracted drivers for long enough to travel close to a mile at motorway speeds. That is not a usability gripe, that is a documented safety hazard that took the industry an embarrassingly long time to acknowledge.

The reason physical controls work better in these contexts is not complicated. A touchscreen is a flat pane of glass with no tactile difference between one area and another, which means you have to look at it, navigate to the right place, and hope the input registers. A physical button is always in the same location, has a distinct feel, and gives you immediate confirmation that something happened. The broader search for a new interface has driven a lot of product decisions in the last decade, and minimalism is worth pursuing in plenty of contexts, but stripping out the controls people rely on for fast and eyes-free interaction is not good design, it is just the appeal of a clean surface winning out over how things actually get used.

None of this required years of complaints and safety research to figure out. Anyone who has tried to turn the heating up on a motorway, or skip a track mid-run on a cold morning, already knew the answer. The decision to remove buttons was about aesthetics and cost, and customers paid for it in daily frustration. The correction is finally underway, pushed by regulators rather than manufacturers coming to their senses, which tells you everything about how seriously the industry took the feedback. On my wrist the buttons are already there, and I am not going back.