Remote Work Is Evolving: Researchers Reveal Key Benefits, Challenges and the Future Workplace

By Anthony Borreli

Image: Ian Harber / Unsplash

Zoom meetings are piling up in your calendar. Ping! Your supervisor just messaged you, asking for a quick update on a project.

Later, a frustrated co-worker wants to hop on a video call to walk through the process for posting on your organization’s website; it’s too complicated to explain via email.

Does any of that sound familiar?

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses and organizations into remote work. In the years since, what began as a safety measure has, in certain ways, reshaped workplace culture. Many workplaces have restored in-person schedules; in others, remote or hybrid options have had mixed results.

Researchers at Binghamton University are investigating the advantages and challenges of remote-work practices from different angles, leaning into their expertise in areas such as leadership development or navigating complex systems. Keenly aware that students are entering a workforce with new expectations about the dynamics of office life, Binghamton researchers are beginning with basic questions:

• How can we build virtual teams to optimize creativity and the flow of ideas?
• What’s the most effective way to stand out as a leader in virtual workplace settings?
• Can you manage virtual teams as effectively as in-person groups?
• How can companies make work-from-home practices sustainable?

The most obvious benefit of a virtual work environment is enhanced flexibility. It has improved accessibility for employees by reducing travel and encouraging a healthier work–life balance, says Hiroki Sayama, distinguished professor of systems science and industrial engineering and an expert on complex group dynamics.

“There are things you can accomplish more effectively online and things that work better in person,” Sayama says, “so instead of viewing it as one option being better than the other, managers would benefit by looking at which option is best suited to meet the objective.”

A study published in January 2025, co-authored by Sayama and Shelley Dionne, dean of Binghamton’s School of Management, offered insights into how people should be organized to develop the best ideas. Larger teams of people with diverse backgrounds tend to produce more conservative — almost “safer” — ideas because everyone vetted them from their own areas of expertise, according to the study. Those who interacted with fewer group participants felt more isolated, but they also produced stronger ideas.

Standing out in a virtual crowd

Sitting around a table as a group makes the banter between team members feel more natural. You can read a person’s facial cues and gauge how others respond to ideas.

The same can’t always be said if you’re in a virtual meeting. Osterhout Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, Chou-Yu (Joey) Tsai, who co-authored a study in 2024 on cultivating leaders in virtual teams, says dominating a team discussion in a virtual setting doesn’t necessarily make a person a better leader. In virtual teams, where people cannot pick up on nonverbal cues as easily, a person’s responsiveness to other team members plays a significant role in whether they’re perceived as a leader.

But for that leadership to be effective and teamwork to be successful, Tsai adds, all the group’s participants must also speak up.

“Hybrid models are probably the most effective, because you still have some people in the same room to directly engage with others in a conversation. That can’t happen in purely virtual teams, so unless you have a specific role assigned to everyone involved in the virtual team collaboration, it might not function as effectively,” Tsai says. “At the same time, we found the best way to mimic those essential social cues in a virtual setting is to directly state your reaction or what you’re thinking instead of just your facial expression.”

But there’s another layer to ensuring remote or hybrid workplaces achieve positive results, and it’s the backbone of research by School of Management doctoral student Yu Wang. By digging into remote-work practices used to varying extents by 200 of the top law firms across the United States, she’s learning how these approaches could impact human capital, firm productivity and employee satisfaction.

As a strategic policy, Wang says, working from home helps companies reduce costs such as rent and operational expenses, which can prove valuable for employers in high-cost city centers.

Wang’s research has led her to believe businesses can benefit from optimizing their remote-work policies, even though there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” solution. If it’s implemented properly, she says, a remote or hybrid approach could expand job applicant pools and be especially beneficial for some groups, such as pregnant women and people with disabilities.

“Providing remote or hybrid options helps organizations retain talent, especially in industries such as law firms or technology, where employees value autonomy a lot,” Wang says. “Allowing companies to access a broader client base without needing to build new physical offices could also help them unlock new market opportunities while avoiding increasing costs.”

A generational shift and looking ahead

When lockdowns prompted by the pandemic sent employees home, students also had to adapt to learning in remote classroom environments. While this shift reshaped how students approach learning, it also influenced their expectations about flexible work schedules.

Tsai views the continued use of remote or hybrid work as an opportunity for educators to cultivate interpersonal skills that might be conveyed more naturally in person but could make a more substantial impact in virtual settings.

He has also noticed that the current generation of students is more acclimated to socializing online through social media platforms, so it’s no surprise that they might instinctively prefer a meeting on Zoom.

“If we don’t reinforce those skills and show how to integrate those in virtual settings, you could run the risk of people losing a sense of meaning to their work,” Tsai says. “It can be much harder to mimic the close mentorship among colleagues in a virtual space; you don’t learn from your co-workers in the same way, and if you do learn, it’s at a much slower pace.”

This trend could easily continue for a decade or longer as the younger workforce becomes more entrenched, Sayama says, potentially clashing with the viewpoints of older managerial generations.

However, one avenue he’s exploring is how the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems might enhance or exploit virtual work environments.

Whether it’s AI-driven transcription services or using AI in communication algorithms, tools could help improve efficiency in remote workplaces, as long as they don’t completely replace human connections. Sayama says a similar dynamic arose when email became a mainstream asset, and for the younger generation, integrating online technology into the workplace has become routine.

Looking ahead, the trick will be recognizing when AI should serve as an asset and not a replacement.

“If we’re meeting face-to-face, there’s little room for AI to intervene,” Sayama says. “But as online working environments drive more transition in the coming years, we will likely see more automated communication processed by algorithms.”

Organizations could ensure the long-term success of work-from-home practices by establishing effective mentoring and support systems, Wang says. These could include cross-location communication mechanisms to help employees stay connected, build trust and strengthen team cohesion regardless of where they work.

“To make working from home a sustainable strategic practice, organizations need to go beyond simply ‘allowing’ employees to work remotely by also providing strong internal management support,” Wang says. “This includes leveraging human resource systems to ensure that remote employees have equal access to growth and career development opportunities, such as promotions, training, performance management and recognition.”

Work-from-home tips

Working in virtual or hybrid settings can offer unique advantages and raise new challenges. Here are some research-backed ways to work from home more effectively:

Create a workspace: Designate a clear area where you can focus on work-related tasks to separate work and personal time.

Communicate: Maintain frequent and clear communication with your colleagues and your supervisor, and respond promptly to any questions or issues that arise. Schedule time for video chats with colleagues when you’re able.

Stick to a routine: Follow a daily schedule that helps you structure your time and stay on task.

Set goals: Plan goals to accomplish each day and over the course of a week to help ensure projects and assignments are completed as required.

Maintain work–life balance: Take regular breaks for exercise, limit screen time and prevent burnout. Make time to engage meaningfully with family, including supporting household responsibilities.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented the potential staying power of remote-work practices. It found the percentage of remote workers in 2021 was higher than in 2019, and major industries — including finance, technical services and corporate management — still had more than 30% of their employees working remotely in 2022.

A Pew Research Center survey showed that three years after the pandemic, 35% of workers with jobs that could be performed remotely were still working from home full time.

“How much innovation happens in virtual settings compared to face-to-face settings? It depends; there’s increasing scientific evidence that we’re perhaps missing in virtual meetings many of those ‘serendipity’ moments that could have happened if you’re in the physical office, bumping into people throughout the day and having those smaller conversations that help generate ideas,” Sayama says. “In virtual settings, it’s easy to focus more on the prescribed agenda items, logging off once the meeting is over, instead of those random connections that could lead you in new directions.”

Editor’s note: Originally published by Binghamton University / BingUNews (State University of New York). This republication follows the usage guidance provided by the university’s Office of Media and Public Relations, which indicated that the original story was created without the use of AI tools.

Read next: 

• Study Finds Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLM Performance Without Increasing Output Length or Latency

• Small businesses say they aren’t planning to hire many recent graduates for entry-level jobs – here’s why

• Understanding Online Rage: Why Digital Anger Feels Amplified

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Study Finds Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLM Performance Without Increasing Output Length or Latency

A study by researchers at Google Research reports that repeating an input prompt improves the performance of several large language models when they are not using reasoning, without increasing the number of generated tokens or measured latency in the reported experiments.

The findings are presented in a December 2025 arXiv preprint titled “Prompt Repetition Improves Non-Reasoning LLMs” by Yaniv Leviathan, Matan Kalman, and Yossi Matias. The paper is released as a preprint and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

The authors define prompt repetition as transforming an input from "<QUERY>" to "<QUERY><QUERY>". According to the paper, “when not using reasoning, repeating the input prompt improves performance for popular models (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and Deepseek) without increasing the number of generated tokens or latency.”

The paper states that large language models “are often trained as causal language models, i.e. past tokens cannot attend to future tokens.” As a result, the authors note that “the order of the tokens in a user’s query can affect prediction performance.” The study reports that repeating the prompt “enables each prompt token to attend to every other prompt token,” which the authors state addresses this limitation.

The experiments evaluated seven models: Gemini 2.0 Flash, Gemini 2.0 Flash Lite by Google, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini by OpenAI, Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3.7 Sonnet by Anthropic, and DeepSeek V3. All tests were conducted using each provider’s official application programming interface (API) in February and March 2025.

The models were tested on seven benchmarks: ARC (Challenge), OpenBookQA, GSM8K, MMLU-Pro, MATH, and two custom benchmarks: NameIndex and MiddleMatch. For multiple-choice benchmarks, the paper reports results for both question-first and options-first prompt orders.

When reasoning was disabled, the authors report that “prompt repetition improves the accuracy of all tested LLMs and benchmarks.” Using the McNemar test with a p-value threshold of 0.1, the paper reports that “prompt repetition wins 47 out of 70 benchmark-model combinations, with 0 losses.” In simple terms, this means that in 70 different tests, repeating the prompt made the AI perform better 47 times and never once made it perform worse, showing prompt repetition improves accuracy and did not produce any cases where it performed worse.

The study also evaluates efficiency. The authors report that “prompt repetition and its variants do not increase the lengths of the generated outputs or the measured latencies,” with one noted exception. For Anthropic’s Claude models, the paper states that for “very long requests,” latency increased, which the authors attribute to the prefill stage taking longer.

When reasoning was enabled by asking models to think step by step, the paper reports that “prompt repetition is neutral to slightly positive,” with five wins, one loss, and 22 neutral outcomes across the evaluated cases.

The authors note several limitations. They state that prompt repetition “can affect latency for long prompts, and might be impossible for very long ones.” They also caution that measured latencies "might be affected by" factors such as "network delays or transient loads." and that results “should be taken with a grain of salt.”

The paper concludes by stating, “repeating the prompts consistently improves model performance for a range of models and benchmarks, when not using reasoning”, while noting that further research is needed to explore variations and investigate "when repetition is helpful".

Image: DW-Aigen

Notes: This post was drafted with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed, fact-checked and published by humans.

Read next: Small businesses say they aren’t planning to hire many recent graduates for entry-level jobs – here’s why
by Asim BN via Digital Information World

Small businesses say they aren’t planning to hire many recent graduates for entry-level jobs – here’s why

Murugan Anandarajan, Drexel University; Cuneyt Gozu, Drexel University, and David Prisco, Drexel University

Image: Paymo / Unsplash

Small businesses are planning to hire fewer recent college graduates than they did in 2025, making it likely harder for this cohort to find entry-level jobs.

In our recent national survey, we found that small businesses are 30% more likely than larger employers to say they are not hiring recent college graduates in 2026. About 1 in 5 small-business employers said they do not plan to hire college graduates or expect to hire fewer than they did last year.

This would be the largest anticipated decrease in small businesses hiring new graduates in more than a decade.

Small businesses are generally those with fewer than 500 employees, based on standards from the U.S. Census Bureau and federal labor data.

This slowdown is happening nationwide and is affecting early-career hiring for people graduating from both college and graduate programs – and is more pronounced for people with graduate degrees.

Nearly 40% of small businesses also said they do not plan to hire, or are cutting back on hiring, recent grads who don’t have a master’s of business administration. Almost 60% said the same for people with other professional degrees.

National data shows the same trend. Only 56% of small businesses are hiring or trying to hire anyone at all, according to October 2025 findings by the National Federation of Independent Business, an advocacy organization representing small and independent businesses.

Job openings at small employers are at their lowest since 2020, when hiring dropped sharply during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some small businesses may change their hiring plans later in the spring, but our survey reveals that they are approaching hiring cautiously. This gives new graduates or students getting their diplomas in a few months information on what they can expect in the job market for summer and fall 2026.

How small businesses tend to hire new employees

Our survey, which has been conducted annually at the LeBow Center for Career Readiness at Drexel University, collected data from 647 businesses across the country from August 2025 through November.

About two-thirds of them were small businesses, which reflects their distribution and proportion nationally.

Small businesses employ nearly half of private-sector workers. They also offer many of the first professional jobs that new graduates get to start their careers.

Many small employers in our survey said they want to hire early-career workers. But small-business owners and hiring managers often find that training new graduates takes more time and support than they can give, especially in fields like manufacturing and health care.

That’s why many small employers prefer to hire interns they know or cooperative education students who had previously worked for them while they were enrolled as students.

Larger employers are also being more careful about hiring, but they usually face fewer challenges. They often have structured onboarding, dedicated supervisors and formal training, so they can better support new employees. This is one reason why small businesses have seen a bigger slowdown in hiring than larger employers.

Then there are small businesses in cities that are open to hiring recent graduates but are struggling to find workers. In cities, housing costs are often rising faster than starting salaries, so graduates have to live farther from their jobs.

In the suburbs and rural areas, long or unreliable commutes make things worse. Since small businesses usually hire locally and cannot pay higher wages, these challenges make it harder for graduates to accept and keep entry-level jobs.

Industry and regional patterns

Job prospects for recent college graduates depend on the industry. The 2026 survey shows that employers in health care, construction and finance plan to hire more graduates than other fields. In contrast, manufacturing and arts and entertainment expect to hire fewer new graduates.

Most new jobs are in health care and construction, but these fields usually do not hire many recent college graduates. Health care growth is focused on experienced clinical and support roles, while construction jobs are mostly in skilled trades that require prior training or apprenticeships instead of a four-year degree.

So, even in growing industries, there are still limited opportunities for people just starting their careers.

Even though small businesses are hiring less, there are still opportunities for recent graduates. It’s important to be intentional when preparing for the job market. Getting practical experience matters more than ever. Internships, co-ops, project work and short-term jobs help students show they are ready before getting a full-time position.

Employers often say that understanding how the workplace operates is just as important as having technical skills for people starting their careers.

We often remind students in our classes at LeBow College of Business that communication and professional skills matter more than they expect. Writing clear emails, being on time, asking thoughtful questions and responding well to feedback can make candidates stand out. Small employers value these skills because they need every team member to contribute right away.

Students should also prepare for in-person work. Almost 60% of small employers in our survey want full-time hires to work on-site five days a week. In smaller companies, graduates who can take on different tasks and adjust quickly are more likely to set themselves apart from other candidates.

Finally, local networking is still important. Most small employers hire mainly within their region, so building relationships and staying active in the community are key for early-career opportunities.

Murugan Anandarajan, Professor of Decision Sciences and Management Information Systems, Drexel University; Cuneyt Gozu, Associate Clinical Professor of Organizational Behavior, Drexel University, and David Prisco, Director, Center for Career Readiness, Drexel University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read next:

• Half Of Americans Say They’ve Made A Point To Disconnect Digitally; Gen Z (63%) And Millennials (57%) Lead Offline Trend

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Half Of Americans Say They’ve Made A Point To Disconnect Digitally; Gen Z (63%) And Millennials (57%) Lead Offline Trend

Half of Americans say they’re more disconnected than ever — but in a good way, according to new research.

Image: Letícia Alvares / Pexels

In the survey of 2,000 Americans, 50% said they’ve made a point to disconnect digitally and spend less time on screens for their well-being.

And young Americans are trailblazing this trend, with more Gen Z (63%) and millennials (57%) getting offline than Gen X (42%) and baby boomers (29%).

The study was conducted by Talker Research on behalf of ThriftBooks and revealed that Gen Z (54%) and millennials (43%) are also more likely than Gen X (33%) and baby boomers (22%) to have a designated screen-free time in their day.

Uncovering the “why” behind this trend, respondents said that being digitally disconnected makes them feel more productive (42%), present for their loved ones (33%) and aware of the goings-on in their daily lives (36%).

And when they notice they’re spending too much time on screens, people reported they feel overwhelmed (25%), anxious (22%), irritable (18%) and unsatisfied with their lives (19%). They also reported that, on average, 70% of the time they spend online leads to feelings of disconnection and loneliness rather than authentic connection.

Looking at how these feelings influence daily habits and decisions, more than eight in 10 Americans (84%) said they’ve incorporated analogue lifestyle choices in their day-to-day, which emphasize non-digital tools in favor of slower, more tangible ways of living.

According to the findings, the top 10 analogue trends and habits were writing notes in a notebook (32%), reading printed books (31%), using paper calendars (28%), playing physical games, like board games or puzzles (27%) and using alarm clocks (27%).

Along with those, respondents said they write paper letters (23%), use physical planners (20%), wear wristwatches (17%), listen to records or CDs (17%) and use camera devices, instead of phone cameras (12%).

“The study findings indicate that people are more aware than ever of the value of offline time,” said Barbara Hagen. “What’s even more interesting and positive to see is that people are replacing this time with healthy habits and activities, like reading.”

In the survey, more than three-quarters (77%) said that the older they grow, the more they realize the importance of spending time in the “real world” as opposed to the online world.

For many (66%), this looks like incorporating slow living (e.g., a slower, more mindful approach to life that prioritizes intention and quality over speed) in the new year, with Gen Z (71%) and millennials (70%) once again leading the charge to slow down.

When respondents want to slow down and seek a break from the online world, they said they turn to reading (32%), quality time with friends and family (51%), hands-on hobbies (31%) and time outdoors (41%) as alternatives.

Zooming in to how reading benefits mental health, compared to time spent online, Americans said that picking up a book makes them feel relaxed (46%), mentally stimulated (32%) and grounded (27%).

And in line with the trend of digital disconnection, the data found that reading will be more popular than ever in 2026, with 70% of people reporting they plan to read more in the new year.

Twenty-nine percent think they’ll consume equal amounts of fiction and nonfiction in 2026, 24% anticipate they’ll read more non-fiction books and 22% think that fiction will be their top category.

Also concurrent with the rest of the study findings that analogue tools and habits are on the rise, half of those polled (49%) want to read more physical books in the new year.

“Reading books, especially printed ones, is an excellent way to slow down, ground yourself and really immerse yourself in an activity that gives back to you,” continued Hagen. “Not only is it mentally stimulating, but it’s a great way to relax, calm down and get a break from our busy lives.”

TOP 10 ANALOGUE LIFESTYLE TRENDS

1. Writing notes in a notebook (32%)
2. Reading printed books (31%)
3. Using a paper calendar (28%)
4. Playing physical games, like board games or puzzles (27%)
5. Using an alarm clock (27%)
6. Writing paper letters/notes (23%)
7. Using a paper planner (20%)
8. Wearing a wristwatch (17%)
9. Listening to records or CDs (17%)
10. Using a camera device, instead of the camera on my phone (12%)

This article was originally published on Talker Research.

Read next: Study Shows Digital Platforms Can Aid Atrocity Prevention Through Context-Specific Hashtag Campaigns
by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Study Shows Digital Platforms Can Aid Atrocity Prevention Through Context-Specific Hashtag Campaigns

By Emily Ciarlo '25

Social media is often criticized for fueling misinformation and violence, but it could actually play a role in preventing genocide and mass atrocities – if used strategically.

Image: DIW-Aigen

A new paper co-authored by Professor of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm examined social media hashtag campaigns during times of crisis and found that digital platforms can aid in atrocity prevention if they are tailored to the context of the crisis at hand.

“Governments are increasingly using social media, though often not with atrocity prevention in mind, and social media companies have largely abandoned efforts to try to monitor hate speech and inflammatory postings on their platforms,” said Wiebelhaus-Brahm.

Along with Associate Professor of Justice Studies Arnaud Kurze at Montclair University, Wiebelhaus-Brahm examined social media campaigns in Canada and Syria, analyzing more than 5,000 social media posts tied to hashtag campaigns to determine how they were used during moments of crisis. The hashtags examined were:

• #TruthAndReconciliation – associated with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which addresses historical injustice on indigenous people
• #SaveSyria – associated with a broader campaign aimed at highlighting the humanitarian and political crises in Syria

The researchers focused on Canada and Syria as case studies in this research due to the nature of their differences in conflict. In Syria, there is an ongoing civil war; meanwhile, in Canada, the conflict itself was a bit more removed, focusing on injustices towards indigenous and native populations.

“In looking at Canada and Syria, they’re two places that arguably were some of the first areas – some of the first countries – where contention around mass atrocity and trying to prevent future atrocities was happening in social media space,” said Wiebelhaus-Brahm.

Their analysis of both hashtag campaigns revealed that social media can be an effective tool in atrocity prevention – in helping to identify the early warning signs of violence, amplify the voices of local people, and draw attention from the international community. However, stakeholders need to be more strategic in tailoring policies to the specific context of the crisis at hand.

Wiebelhaus-Brahm hopes that this study will spur more research on using social media for atrocity prevention, which to date has been mostly speculative.

“This is one of the earliest empirical explorations of this question. And so one of the things that I hope comes of this is more research looking at different kinds of atrocity contexts, looking at different social media platforms at different points in time,” said Wiebelhaus-Brahm.

The paper, “Comparative Insights on Social Media as an Atrocity Prevention Tool: Policy Implications,” was published in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Binghamton University, State University of New York and is republished here with permission. The original story was produced without the use of AI tools.

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• How Startups Can Win Silent Support in Online Forums, According to a New ESMT Study

• Google Updates Trends Explore Page With Gemini Features

by External Contributor via Digital Information World

Google Updates Trends Explore Page With Gemini Features

Google announced on Jan. 14, 2026, that it has redesigned the Explore page of Google Trends, adding new features that use Gemini capabilities for analyzing Search trends.

According to Google, the updated page is designed for content creators, researchers, and other users to identify and compare related search topics. The redesign introduces a side panel that automatically surfaces relevant search terms and displays them together for comparison. Google said the panel also provides suggested prompts to support further exploration of a topic.

The company said users can edit search terms and adjust filters such as location, time range, and property to change the data shown. The Explore page also features a new visual layout, with distinct icons and colors assigned to each search term.

Google said it has increased the number of terms that can be compared and doubled the number of rising queries shown on each timeline. The updated experience is launching initially on desktop and will roll out gradually.

Notes: This post was drafted with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed, edited, and published by humans.

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• Yes, those big touchscreens in cars are dangerous and buttons are coming back
by Ayaz Khan via Digital Information World

Yes, those big touchscreens in cars are dangerous and buttons are coming back

Image: Amar A / Unsplash

Milad Haghani, The University of Melbourne

In recent years, the way drivers interact with cars has fundamentally changed. Physical buttons have gradually disappeared from dashboards as more functions have been transferred to touchscreens.

Touchscreens in vehicle dashboards date back to the 1980s. But modern cars consolidate functions into these systems far beyond what we’ve seen before, to the point where a car feels mostly like a computer.

This may create the impression of a modern, technologically advanced vehicle. However, scientific evidence increasingly points to touchscreens compromising our safety.

In fact, ANCAP Safety, the independent car safety assessment program for Australia and New Zealand, has announced that from 2026 it will ask car manufacturers to “bring back buttons” for important driver controls, including headlights and windscreen wipers. Similar moves are underway in Europe.

ANCAP Safety will explicitly assess how vehicle design supports safe driving, and not just how well occupants are protected in the event of a crash – which means calling time on touchscreens that control everything in your car.

What human factors research says about distraction

Decades of road-safety research show human error plays a role in the vast majority of crashes. And the design of in-vehicle interfaces can contribute to how often drivers make safety errors.

Errors behind the wheel are often linked to driver distraction. But what exactly constitutes distraction, and how does it occur?

In human factors research, distraction is typically classified as visual, manual, cognitive, or a combination of these. A distracting event or stimulus may take the driver’s eyes off the road, their hands off the wheel, their mind off the driving task – or all three.

This is why texting while driving is considered particularly dangerous: it uses our visual, manual and cognitive resources at the same time. The more types of attention a task demands, the greater the level of distraction it creates.

Interactions with touchscreen menus can, in theory, produce comparable effects to texting. Adjusting a vehicle’s temperature using a sliding bar on a screen makes the driver divert visual attention from the road and allocate cognitive resources to the task.

By contrast, a physical knob allows the same adjustment to be made with minimal or no visual input. Tactile feedback and muscle memory compensate for the lack of visual information and let you complete the task while keeping eyes on the road.

How distracting are touchscreen features, really?

Perhaps the clearest and most accessible evidence to date comes from a 2020 UK study conducted by TRL, an independent transport research company.

Drivers completed simulated motorway drives while performing common in-car tasks. These included selecting music or navigating menus using touchscreen systems such as Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

Performance was compared against baseline driving with no secondary task, as well as voice-based interaction.

When drivers interacted with touchscreens, their reaction times increased markedly.

At motorway speeds, this delay in reaction time corresponds to a measurable increase in stopping distance, meaning a driver would travel several additional car lengths before responding to a hazard.

Lane keeping and overall driving performance deteriorated too as a result of interaction with touchscreens.

The most striking aspect of this study is that touchscreen interaction was as distracting and, in some cases, even more distracting than texting while driving or having a handheld phone call.

Drivers don’t even like touchscreens

Concerns about touchscreen-heavy design are not limited to lab studies. They have also shown up clearly in overseas consumer surveys.

Data from a recent survey of 92,000 US buyers indicate that infotainment systems – the official term for that touchscreen in the centre of the dashboard – remain the most problematic feature in new cars.

The survey shows infotainment systems lead to more complaints in the first 90 days of ownership than any other vehicle system.

Most complaints relate to usability. Drivers report frustration with basic controls that have been moved to touchscreens – such as lights, windshield wipers, temperature – and now require multiple steps and visual attention to operate while driving.

Could voice recognition be the solution?

Voice recognition is often presented as a safer alternative to touchscreens because it removes the need to look away from the road. But evidence suggests it’s not completely risk free either.

A large meta-analysis of experimental studies examined how drivers perform while using in-vehicle and smartphone voice-recognition systems, combining results from 43 different studies.

Across the evidence base, voice interaction worsens driving performance compared with driving without any secondary task. It increases reaction times and negatively influences lane keeping and hazard detection.

When voice systems are compared with visual-manual systems, performance is slightly better with voice control. But even though voice recognition is less distracting than touchscreens, it’s still measurably more distracting compared to baseline driving where drivers don’t need to interact with any menus or change settings.

The comeback of buttons

The evidence is clear: controls we frequently use while driving – temperature, fan speed, windscreen demisting, volume and many others – should remain tactile.

The driver shouldn’t have to divert their visual attention from the road to control these. It’s especially problematic when such controls are buried in layered menus, so you need to tap several times just to find the function you want to change.

Touchscreens are better suited to secondary functions and settings typically adjusted before driving, such as navigation setup, media selection, and vehicle customisation.

The good news is the evidence is being translated into car safety assessment programs. From this year, ANCAP Safety and its counterpart in the European Union, Euro NCAP, will require physical controls for certain features to award the highest safety rating for new vehicles.

It’s up to manufacturers to decide whether to comply. However, some car makers, such as Volkswagen and Hyundai, have already been responding to these requirements and to pressure from consumers to bring the buttons back.

Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

by External Contributor via Digital Information World