Remote Control II

11/14/2006 I went to Indianapolis to participate in the Usability Day activity. People sit on a same table automatically became a team, and every team designed a remote control.

Our remote control has two sides. A-side is called simple side, hard button side, which contains only simple buttons, such as power, channel plus and minus, volume plus and minus, and the ten number buttons. This simple side is designed for people who confuse by lots of buttons, and fear to use a complex system. They are old people, children, and maybe some others who fear to make mistakes or don’t understand technologies. B-side is complex and soft ware side. It is a touch screen. Users can choose what hardware they want to remote control, such as TV, DVD, VCR, sound box. According the hardware user chose, different control menu show up on the touch screen. It should be universal (control multi-hardware, recognize the hardware’s brand and model, and fit for people who use different language—universal signs), free (easy to get it). I also suggested that make our remote control smart. If it gets pressure or maybe is covered by some other things, that means it is not easy to be found by users, so it should give some “help” or “I am here” sound signal to people.

Maybe the control menu can personalize in some way. For example, if the user watches only several channels on TV, the menu doesn’t need to show all the channels anymore.