Friday, June 11, 2004
Jakob Nielsen loses (remote) control
Known for a passionate and personal perspective, this article discusses his difficulty with working the six remotes to operate his home cinema. Whilst the basic premise of the article is fine (complexity, inconsistency and suchlike cause problems) it is remarkable that he is getting mileage out of this about 10 years after Harold Thimbleby and others talked about it and actually did something about it too in their constructive models and manuals. It's partly a measure of the lack of commercial influence that HCI has that the problems still remain, but there are some issues that I think are partly resolved that Jakob simply hasn't got.
The prime one is that I have a similar system at home, and to turn it all on and watch somethnig I press one button. Ditto to turn it off. All my remotes are combined into one, and that has been programmed to issue ordered instructions which makes the whole thing work. So it is possible to do, and is easy to use.
Where it fails is that this single remote is still really mimicking the seperate ones, and so does not offer a complete cognitive experience ('watch t.v.' or 'listen to the radio') - instead it is programmed with a sequence of commands to achieve a similar effect, but if the mode you want is not programmed in you are forced back into operating each device in turn.
But the systems are not simple - there are numerous ways to connect up TVs, videos, TiVOs, digital boxes, terrestrial airels, DVD players, amplifiers and tuners - ordering them differently gives you different effects, and with some offering one standard and others a different one, it's not suprising that there is a lack of integration. For example, my video only offers VHS out, but my other inputs are S-VHS for better quality - should I go for easier use or better quality? Quality wins each time, but it means I have to switch the t.v. input channel and aspect ratio each time as well, and that means monitoring the video channel only happens in black and white.....
Which is not to say that we should not aim for a better experience, it's just that it is not the easy goal that is implied.
Known for a passionate and personal perspective, this article discusses his difficulty with working the six remotes to operate his home cinema. Whilst the basic premise of the article is fine (complexity, inconsistency and suchlike cause problems) it is remarkable that he is getting mileage out of this about 10 years after Harold Thimbleby and others talked about it and actually did something about it too in their constructive models and manuals. It's partly a measure of the lack of commercial influence that HCI has that the problems still remain, but there are some issues that I think are partly resolved that Jakob simply hasn't got.
The prime one is that I have a similar system at home, and to turn it all on and watch somethnig I press one button. Ditto to turn it off. All my remotes are combined into one, and that has been programmed to issue ordered instructions which makes the whole thing work. So it is possible to do, and is easy to use.
Where it fails is that this single remote is still really mimicking the seperate ones, and so does not offer a complete cognitive experience ('watch t.v.' or 'listen to the radio') - instead it is programmed with a sequence of commands to achieve a similar effect, but if the mode you want is not programmed in you are forced back into operating each device in turn.
But the systems are not simple - there are numerous ways to connect up TVs, videos, TiVOs, digital boxes, terrestrial airels, DVD players, amplifiers and tuners - ordering them differently gives you different effects, and with some offering one standard and others a different one, it's not suprising that there is a lack of integration. For example, my video only offers VHS out, but my other inputs are S-VHS for better quality - should I go for easier use or better quality? Quality wins each time, but it means I have to switch the t.v. input channel and aspect ratio each time as well, and that means monitoring the video channel only happens in black and white.....
Which is not to say that we should not aim for a better experience, it's just that it is not the easy goal that is implied.
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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