Comment by mikeryan
13 years ago
Remotes are incredibly hard to design. My company builds Smart TV Apps we have just about every remote imaginable and that Samsung one you chose "just works" its like the Nokia 3310 of remotes. You can pick it up and use it without thinking about it.
Show me a remote that works better then that one and I can probably tell you why it sucks.
That was my first-cut search and so it's certainly not the worst example, but in software if I put buttons like "T.Link" and "DMA" and 4 unlabeled colored buttons right on the main home-screen of a consumer-oriented UI I'd be laughed out of the room.
Buttons like that are an artifact of the days when TVs didn't have on-screen UIs. The remote should not be designed for the 1% of users that fiddle with such things.
Do heatmaps and find out which buttons are actually used frequently give those big clear buttons with unabbreviated labels, and move everything else into the menus.
And the menus themselves - you have a whole screenful of space, you can actually describe to the user what each option does in helpful detail.
Apple remote comes to mind: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3176
I would like to hear you opinion.
The Apple Remote is solid similar to the Samsung but with out all the keys.
Roku's first remote was very similar but had the same problem - no back button. If you're going to do interactive apps on your TV you need a back button and an exit or "home" button - they're two different things. The Apple remote assumes very limited input almost zero text input so no numbers or extraneous keys like the color keys.
My favorite remote close to the apple one was the Boxee 1 remote (it too needs an explicit back button). But the slim, pared down front side design with the full keyboard on the back was very slick and usable.
http://old-blog.boxee.tv/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Boxee-Bo...
That's interesting: the remote was one of the two reasons I ditched my Boxee (the second being that the UI was painful). Initially, the keyboard was a major selling point for me over my AppleTV remote but grey text on black rubber buttons? No backlight? Trying to use the keyboard functionality of the remote in anything other than full lighting was an exercise in futility.
To be fair: UI (virtual and physical) is hard. Thus far, the AppleTV is my favorite but it's a "lesser of two evils" scenario.
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Apple remote is great for the target audience, but unusable for a mass market product.
For many consumers, any feature not accessible with a single button won't exist. It will be a major pain point. Having it be accessible as a sequence of actions or through a menu won't work.
Try doing usability testing with a few grumpy 65 year olds or people who have trouble operating a microwave. They are a larger market than you think.
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This is my current setup:
http://www.squidoo.com/uhost-android-mini-pc-review
specifically:
http://s19.postimage.org/f82vickg3/uhost_air_mouse.jpg (the device on the right - the left is the actual Android machine itself)
It would be wonderful if it had a keyboard and better-quality accelerometers. But it's just too coarse and clumsy as an airmouse, and Android is touch-based so you need a perfect pointer to make it pleasant.
The Apple remote is exactly the remote that came to my mind when I think simplicity. That's what most people use. up, down, left, right, center(for enter/go/confirm) and a menu (for options, back).
Thats 99% of a remote usage, the rest is handled by any GUI.
Except when you have nearly 100+ channels, and remember the 3 digit code for most of the ones you care about - then you want a numeric keypad rather than fiddling around moving up and down in a menu.
I'd never want to be stuck with just an Apple remote.
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That was my though too. But to do that you have to control both software and hardware which Apple can.
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The LG Magic Remote is by far the best remote I have ever used, particularly for "smart" content, browsing, using apps such as NetFlix, etc. It's almost as natural and simple as using a mouse and hands down beats other TV type input methods I've seen (game controllers, Apple remote, etc.).
Shame LG seem intent on ruining it with the spying, I hope they have a change of approach and resolve this.