Bit of fun - UX design challenge

[Alex Morris]

Hey all

Been meaning to do this for ages. How about a little design challenge for group members?

http://gallery.me.com/alexmorris#100036

You'll find an image of a Sky Remote here. The Sky Remote is one of the worst pieces of interaction design in mass production right now.

Your challenge is to fix it. No restrictions on format, sketch, jpeg, wireframe... up to you. Just make the useless thing a bit more friendly.

Upload your entries to the .mac gallery using your name as the filename, blog your entry here with a short design rationale and we'll set up a nice democratic voting process to crown a winner. Who knows Sky may buy your awesome idea off you?!!

Have fun!

Alex

[Alex Morris]

You could be right Ben - however the existing design is so broken, any improvement over the dazzling array of options would be a huge step forward.

[Ben Simmonds]

I wonder if there's also a marketing motive behind this. Many buttons implies many features. Whilst slicker remote control devices would be appealing to the user, they just don't expose the TV's features in such an immediate way... which I guess is all important in the TV showroom.

[Fergus Roche]

Hi Alex,
I've never understood TV remote design and why the hell it doesn't have maybe 2 or 3 buttons at most. Why oh why are there all these buttons and a desperate need to get all the functions you need into the physical object that sits in your hand? There is obviously the legacy of functions issue. But why oh why when there's a dirty great big screen with a ton of real estate for navigating content do we not put the functions on the screen and not in our hand?! Never understood this. And being its a TV/monitor/screen etc, you can increase the potential real estate than just that of the screen i.e. cycle through pages and pages. Thereby increasing the potential real estate by a huge factor.

I mean, the devices are out there that could be copied e.g. an ipod wheel, a blackberry thumbwheel etc.

Plus we know the handset to TV controls must work - teletext, the menus one cycles through to alter the TVs brightness etc. But no menus for controlling what your watching.

So its obvious to me. The answer is you put all controls on the screen. You need an on/off button and some sort of wheel/up+down button to cycle through stuff. And that's it.

Why hasn't it happened? I know it has on game consoles. The PS3 one is lovely I think. But not the humdrum TV. Closest thing is satelite TV boxes - but still a huge big remote. Just like your picture shows.

Now I feel I should answer my own question i.e. why the hell hasn't this really obvious thing happened. Sure I'm not the first to think of it.

[1] change in the land of TV
Lets start with Sky. I did a little bit of work with Sky and the project team I was part of, wanted to look at changing the way that users could select programmes online which would impact their TV viewing e.g. online recording and the like. I found out that the Sky interactive menus on the TV have a build cycle of close to 18 months. So anything you want to change on them there menus you had [a] better be sure and [b] plan far, far ahead.

NB: this was pitch work about 18 months ago, so dont quote me. Merely ancedotal.

[2] Humans
How many people are involved in the chain between the user watching the TV and the actual TV programme itself? How many people would such a device change impact? I assume the chain is quite long, hence why this hasnt happened. It would take a big player to step in and say "oh, knock this silly product design off! Now" [sorry, went all a bit john clesse]

[3] "Oh but the TVs too far away. Wouldn't work. Thats not how it works"
That voice am sure is quite loud in the land of TV design. I can hear that voice now. But I can't understand it. The user is watching the TV. So clearly can see it. And if the text was too small [which cant be the case considering the longevity of teletext]

[4] Some sort of standard for TV controls is absent it seems across manufacturers and TV content.

[5] One day they'll be monitors and TV content will come from the land of the internet [and all our web interface baggage] will join the fray. This should be enough to destroy the TV remote. But not before we get a TV remote that "can do Sky TV and the Web all-in-one-behemoth"

Apologies for the part rant, but I too find it annoying. I know the solution [i think] but don't expect the market to change. Kinda old industry, I'm assuming design investment is right down at the bottom of the curve as would expect the margins to be tight.

But I'd be happy to hear someone tell me why this state of interactive affairs is so. Just don't say its because of a technical reason blah blah. That is just an excuse. The techs there, just not in the right place then.

Ferg-ranting

p.s. good luck with the challenge :) Hope you get some nice designs/prototypes