Button, Button: Who's Got (A Clue About) The Button?

Dr. Robert Adler, inventor of the TV wireless remote control (1956), died on February 15. He was 93.

I’m certain that Dr Adler was both delighted and dismayed at what happened to his invention. Delighted that consumers can not only change channels, but can now control an increasing number of audio/video sources and destinations. And this leads to the dismay – the remote has gone from an amazing enabler for couch potatoes to a frustrating device with an often confusing and obscure user interface. This, of course, was not his fault – I concede that this is a tough problem, but I get the feeling that most consumer electronics companies (in the best case) make too many assumptions about their audience, and (in the worst case) don’t do any usability tests beyond the in-house design engineer.

The main issue, in my opinion, is the product developers' desire to expose every possible function versus the remote control designers' desire to squeeze 147 functions onto a 2”x8” hunk of plastic, leading to the proliferation of multi-function and/or “shift” command buttons. It seems to me that the CE products with displays should have solved this problem, but on-screen functions seem to have made things worse.

I have a DVD recorder that has, in addition to the controls that you would expect (0-9, Play etc.), a central Enter button with four arrow buttons around it (up, down, right, left), which is in turn surrounded by four separate buttons labeled Navigator/TopMenu, Functions, SubMenu, and Return. Right off the bat, problem one – when do you use Enter vs. Return? (Answer: in this device Enter selects the operation, while Return actually returns you to the previous screen - why not instead label it Previous or, even simpler, Back?)

Below that set of controls is a set of twelve 1/8” x 1/4” black function buttons labeled Prog/Check, Display, Time Slip, TVGuide, Setup, Erase, RecMode, Rec, Info, Dubbing, Chapter, and Status. Most of these appear straightforward (TVGuide brings up the TV Guide), but are they? For example, in actual use, when the Program Record display is active, there is an on-screen green circle labeled Set that allows you to open the time/channel set screen when pressing the physical Chapter button (that, unlike the other twelve, has a rectangular green top). After opening that screen, the green circle is now labeled Cancel, also selected by pressing the Chapter button - so the same color (and button labeled Chapter) is being used for two very different concepts - "set" and "cancel".

By the way, to compound the confusion, nowhere does it say on-screen that you need to press the Enter key to actually save the recording - and if you do figure that out, after hitting Enter, the ubiquitous Green button now lets you set the recording Frequency!!!! To me dedicated buttons labeled Set and Cancel would go a long way on this thing!

This remote indiscriminately borrows terminology from computers, assuming that the user will be comfortable with a computer's version of functionality. It’s bad enough that most CE device manuals are bad translations of button-description-only/ no-real world- tutorials (fodder for another blog post), but am I wrong in feeling that I should not have to read a manual to use a remote? Is anybody out there focusing on user interface? Is there anything out there that designers can use as a model?

Denis Labrecque
Analog Devices