What household remotes taught me about User Experience

This is a tale of 2 remote controls. It’s also an awesome lesson about effective UX and that newer doesn’t always make it better. Press on (see what I did there?) and learn something about building your app/website/newsletter/whatever you are making. Cos good UX is at the heart of everything.

We were simple people in the old days (that’s 2000). When my wife and I built our house, we had one remote for our heater and evaporative cooler . We are now much posher and have 2 remotes, the second one coming with the replacement cooler when the original cooler literally blew off in a storm . . . . Love those Spring winds in Melbourne yessiree.

In between was about 15 years of R&D, marketing, circuit design and apparently, no user experience research. First let me show you the remotes.

At first glance , the new remote on the right looks a tad more modern. It has a backlight, a bigger display, it’s a little smaller. Its also crappy to use. Let me explain . . .

With any design you should ask yourself — “What’s the customer going to do most”. With a remote I’d break that down to 4 things:
1-Turn it on
2-Turn it off
3-Turn it up
4-Turn it down

These can be covered by 3 buttons (since on and off can be the same button) and both remotes get that bit right. On/Off and up & down are the top buttons on the remotes. Awesome — that’s a tick for the designers.

Look at the left remote — all the other features are hidden behind a panel. That says two things:
1-You shouldn’t play with these things normally (and just to be sure — they print that on the inside of the lid).
2-If you do use these buttons you are making a conscious choice to do so.

That closed door stops you from getting too close to the things that can mess up the settings. It also separates the 4 things you always need, from everything else. Then (and this is the great bit) it goes one step further by visually and physically making the two most important features stand out on their own.

Take a look at the new remote again — all the buttons are the same shape. Because they made them all big, there’s no room to explain what they actually do.

What the hell does the Enter button do? I don’t know.

What I do know is I have to look at it every time I want to use it so I know which button to press. which brings me to my last point . . .

Because I can operate the old remote by feel, I don’t need to look at it. That’s great for turning things off at night or on early in the morning.

The new remote has a very bright backlit display. It’s completely blinding if you wake up and need to change a setting, so much so that your eyes have to adjust before you can really see it. And this is a problem because you have to look at it, because you need to know if you’ve hit the right button.

I don’t know about you but I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with the schematic for my remote in my head. That thing lights up the room with every button press. I have to stare at it till my eyes adjust because it auto turns off again 10 seconds later and if I haven’t managed to focus and interpret what the screen says, I have to press ANOTHER button to get the light back on. You can see the folly here.

I took that wireframe to friends and family as well as potential customers to get their feedback. Colours, shapes, location of buttons were all debated.

Our main corporate colours are orange with a navy highlight. Designers reversed that for the interface so as not to blind our users :) Im glad they did because I would have gone the other way and it would have been awful. In fact the shift colours are customised by each customer — so if they already have colours they use to seperate shifts, there’s nothing to relearn.

The KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) is a great place to start. Remember the end user needs the interface — not your marketing team. Be ruthless. Less is more. Complex interfaces create confusion, slow users down and increase your support costs. Don’t underestimate the effort to get this right but the rewards are worth it.

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