You *will* smile when you see this design. Trust me. You will.
Then come back and we can talk about why it’s so smile-evoking.
Philco PC from Dave Schultze on Vimeo.
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Design
Found this on Digg.com today, and promptly added it to my “Questionable_Designs” set on Flickr.
What a great example of after-the-fact design modification.
It makes me wonder what the context was. Did someone set this up for a young child or an older relative? Or did they do it for themselves?
In any case, it’s a great reminder of why us user experience professionals do what we do.
For those of us in design: remember, you shouldn’t design for *all* the edge cases. You shouldn’t even design for most of them.
Why? Because you clutter the user interface when you try to account for all possible user needs.
A reasonable question to ask at this point is this: if you have a set of rich capabilities that *some* small subset of people might want to access, what do you do?
That answer is actually easy. There’s two things you can do in this very specific case of a TV remote.
Both of them are examples of what I think of as “beyond here be dragons” design. Without going into the etiology of that (in retrospect kinda obtuse) metaphor, let’s just say that it’s often a VERY good idea to surface the UI for your minimal main user stories while burying the controls and interactions for the complex edge case capabilities behind an access point that clearly indicates that the functionality is not intended for most people.
So how do you do this for a TV remote?
- Method 1: Put the advanced functions underneath a sliding cover. This was all the rage 8-10 years ago. Not seen as much today.
Advantages: The cover makes it clear that, well, beyond here be dragons. Effective.
Disadvantages: Presence of physical parts probably means higher cost to manufacture. Physical parts (i.e., cover and slide) also wear out.
- Method 2: Put the advanced functions in the onscreen portion of the UI. The simple controls on the remote can then be used to step through the advanced dialogs and tasks.
Advantages: No additional hardware requirements. Provided the unit can receive updates, the software interactions can be improved if the initial UI design support for the complex stuff isn’t, shall we say, usable.
Disadvantages: Slowwww. Error-prone, especially for interactions requiring alphanumeric input via “point and pick”.
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No, that’s not a typo or PHP code run amok. That’s the hashtag I’m fixin’ to use on Twitter to denote “Good Design of the Day” and “Bad Design of the Day” tweets that I, uh, tweet.
Y’know how I was using the “Questionable_Design” tag on Flickr so people could tag pictures of good/bad design? Yeah, it didn’t exactly catch fire and go viral. (Although it has been useful for me to classify design pics that I upload.)
So I’m giving Twitter hashtags a try. Feel free to join in the fun. Got an example of good design? Tweet it and add “#gdotd”. Bad design? Tweet it and add “#bdotd.”
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Say what you will about Wil Wright’s Spore. One thing he and the team got right: the creator interaction. Ever since I downloaded Creature Creator, my 5- and 9-year old have been building ships, buildings, and creatures endlessly. And more importantly, they’ve discovered how to do this with minimal intervention from me.
Video of Hattie’s creature is here. His name is “Spino Jerry.” Not sure where she got that, exactly.
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