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Development Of The TiVo Remote Charted
victor_the_cleaner writes "The New York Times (anonymous readers need not apply) has an article about the development of the TiVo remote control. The article reviews the user-centered design approach the designers took. According to the lead designer, they considered 'how it feels in the hand, for long periods of time.' How about you - do you have an emotional attachment to your TiVo remote? Or other well-designed objects?"
"...emotional attachment to ... other well-designed objects"
Oh, no... why must they ask such a question on Slashdot?!? Why?!?
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
"how it feels in the hand, for long periods of time"... I don't know about you, but I don't get attached to things that feel good in my hand... except for certain bod- errr nevermind
It is obvious what it is designed for and easy to use.
The TiVo folks really did a great job in the design of the remote, however I would have liked it a little smaller. It's kind of like the phasers in Star Trek TNG which went from being gun-like to being tamagotchi-like to the final TV remote shape. If TiVo could fit all that functionality into a tamagotchi sized remote, I would be the first one at the store to buy.
I have been pwned because my
...and in other news, several thousand internet users mysteriously suffered spontaneous eye bleeding.
Just my humble opinion... but the TiVo Peanut Remote is the best designed remote control ever made. It fits your hand perfectly, and all of the controls are easily reached with your thumb. The only problem is that it can't control your DVD player.
I don't think karma-whoring works very well without line breaks :p
My fiancee got me this awesome programmable remote control. You know, with the touch sensitive lcd, learning functions (works with Bose stereos even!). That cleaned up 5 remotes off of our coffee table. The only remote I refuse to program into it is the Tivo remote. That thing is perfect. Accept no substitute. Every button is well placed, and easy to locate without looking. She understands...
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
This is a really cool project you might want to check out if you're interested in controlling the TiVo unit with a web browser rather than the standard remote control. i mean, sure the control is great and all, but i prefer a mouse :)
see here.
I have a strong attachment to my WASD layout for FPS games.
Often times at work I find my fingers relaxing into FPS stance.
What about badly designed objects? My comcast cable remote is horrible. To use the scroll buttons on the program guide (if it can be called such, half of it is ads) I need to contort my wrist. Why remote controls are still shaped like hotdog buns is beyond me. On some level, these designers must realize that an ideal situation would involve a more mouse-like remote. And please, lets start using RF instead of IR. I'm sick of pointing my remote. Yes I'm that lazy.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Google Link here
As an interface designer I'm happy on both a professional and personal level to see user-centric design getting press lately. On the other hand I'm afraid that a lot of MBA-types will read articles like this and figure that they can just throw a designer at a problem and expect them to fix everything that's wrong with their product.
Real UI design will not fix fundamental flaws in a product. In fact a good designer will probably uncover problems that no one had noticed before. The reason that Tivo's interface is good is because the entire product was designed from the beginning around being easy to use. I'm willing to bet that there were designers involved in the product from the very beginning.
I recommend that people interested in this sort of thing read Alan Cooper's The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. It's a bit harsh on engineers and I don't buy Cooper's zealousness regarding his techniques but it has a lot of good insight into what can go wrong and how to avoid it.
I also really wish that the press could find a better poster child for our indutry than Nielsen, whose core competency is attention whoring and getting people to pay him thousands of dollars for speaking gigs [something he excels at]. He's got some pretty smart coworkers who have actually designed products that changed the way we interact with computers. Nielsen's crown jewel is a kooky Sun skunkworks project.
...TiVo remote? Or other well-designed objects?
:)
Yes, my second generation iPod
Cheers,
Mike
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
I have used the TiVo remote, and it is pretty good... I prefer the remote I have, though.
It is the Radio Shack universal 15-2116 (previously 14-1994, which I also still own). I hacked together a little parallel cable to connect it to my computer and program every single button exactly how I want (called the JP1 hack). You can map any button any way you want, clear out the memory of unused buttons, etc. I have that thing programmed for 6 different things (from the replayTV to the original Apex hacked dvd player to an offbrand tv/vcr combo) and have the buttons so intuitively mapped that I don't ever need to look at it. It also has this weird textured plastic that feels like hardened suede. IR learning and everything else, all for $30.
IANAL, but I play one on
Another problem with the Philips remote is that it feels the same upside down, making it hard to tell which way you're holding it in the dark. With the Sony remote, I can do everything without even glancing at the thing.
On the whole, the Sony remote is among the best remotes I've ever used for anything. No extraneous buttons (you use basically everything), but the frequently used stuff is intelligently placed.
I'll go along with this one, I love my Logi mouse, with the caveat issue that you raise. I'm ambimousterous, but not fully ambidexterous. The Logi is a right hander period.
When taking hand written notes I have to use my right hand to write and left hand for the mouse. The best symetrical mouse I've ever used is the orginal Microsoft optical wheel mouse. It's 98% of the Logi, in either hand, so I can pass it back and forth with ease.
Speaking of writing, another favorite item of mine is my Parker matte black ballpoint pen. The traditional tapered shape (I can't stand the pencil straight barrel of a Cross), and a bit slender for long writing sessions, but something about its feel and finish hits me just right and I don't do long writing sessions anymore. That's why God invented typing.
Oxo kitchen tools. This stuff is truly the bee's knees. They're simply perfect. I've gotten rid of all my "classy" expensive kitchen stuff in favor of these "cheap" plastic tools.
With the exception of my traditional Japanese bamboo rice paddle. Sometimes the traditional tool is honed to perfection.
Snap-On combination wrenches. The Craftsman stuff is just as good, until you have to spend all day every day turning them. The Snap-Ons are caressable. The Craftsmans will leave your hands mildly abraded and sore.
Shimano bicycle brake levers. It took 100 years before someone got that one right. Go figure.
A replica of a 100 year old Adirondack hiking staff pattern made by the Poestenkill Hiking Staff company. They don't seem to have a web presence and for all know have been out of business for a long time. Mine is 20 years old. Simply perfect. In this case 100 years ago they knew a lot better than we do now. Perfectly shaped. Perfectly balanced. Perfect resilience.
KFG
// The article really pissed me off because of the huge flash ad in the middle of the page. You shouldn't suffer the same. Missing: stock photo of a remote control.
To most home viewers, remote controls may seem like ancillary sidekicks to the main attraction that is the television, DVD player or digital video recorder. Yet in some ways the remote has become the centerpiece of home entertainment: so many functions have been relegated to this slip of an object that if it is lost, you may find yourself unable to do so much as call up a menu for watching the movie you popped into the DVD player.
But if the remote control is a linchpin, it is also often an inscrutable one. A typical remote may have some 40 buttons, with functions that are hard to divine. Often the labels - "toggle," "planner" and the like - are no help. The device can feel like an afterthought, thrown together without any planning at all.
Increasingly, however, electronics companies are recognizing that building an easy-to-use remote control is an important and challenging task. To improve the remote, they are deploying teams of experienced industrial designers who focus on the product for months - and reaching out to consumers for advice.
In 1998, design engineers at TiVo, the Silicon Valley company that helped introduce the digital video recorder to the world, set out to produce a distinctive remote control. The result was a textbook blend of complexity and ease of use.
The peanut-shaped TiVo remote is at once playful and functional. A smiling TV set with feet and rabbit ears, the company's logo, graces the top. Distinctive buttons like a green thumbs-up and a red thumbs-down button have helped the remote win design awards from the Consumer Electronics Association.
"They did a really good job," said Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, a technology consulting firm in Fremont, Calif. Mr. Nielsen called the oversize yellow pause button in the middle of the remote "the most beautiful pause button I've ever seen."
When Paul Newby, TiVo's director of consumer design, arrived in June 1998, as the company was just starting up, he and a team of six designers were given 14 weeks to come up with a functioning remote control. Along the way they relied not only on their own instincts but also on feedback from potential users on everything from the feel of the device in the hand to the best place for the batteries.
Mr. Newby, 45, a mechanical engineer, came to TiVo by way of designing much larger objects - Caterpillar construction equipment, to be specific. Designing something that was by comparison microscopic was an inviting challenge.
Many remotes are monochromatic slices of hard plastic. For years, they have generally stuck to the old design conventions, a rectangle with neat rows and columns of buttons lined up like so many cadets.
"They were designed by - and I hate to say it because I am one of them - engineers," Mr. Newby said.
Mr. Nielsen said: "They work well if you're sitting in bright light and you have good eyesight and you're 20 or 30 years old. They're overloaded with features you don't really need except once a year or once a lifetime."
The shape of the remote - the subtlety of how it feels in the hand - was Mr. Newby's first major design consideration.
Because of the nature of the TiVo video recorder, the remote is held for long periods as users continually choose shows to record, skip commercials, fast-forward and rewind recorded shows, rate programs by pressing the thumbs-up or thumbs-down buttons, and even pause live TV. Designing a remote that consumers would find comfortable was a high priority.
Central to the process, Mr. Newby said, was producing prototypes "early, ugly and often."
Ugly?
"There tends to be this conservatism in the design process," he said. "I encourage young designers to go off and scare me.''
Some of the results fell under the category of "Be careful what you wish for." One sket
The TiVo remote is indeed well-designed and more or less a joy to use. However, it seems to suffer a problem pandemic to all remotes: the eventual mysterious "buttons need ever-larger amounts of pressure to make electrical contact" problem. I tried taking it apart (which, of course, no remote is designed for), breaking the tiny points of the circuit board at the front. I washed the contacts anyway and put it back together, only to discover that the buttons now worked well, but the visible-light LED no longer worked. Sigh.
So I ordered a replacement from the TiVo website. Oddly expensive -- $35. Plus, only the translucent blue was available. On top of that, when it came, I discovered it was slightly different from the old remote in form and function. The immediate upshot was that it's slightly longer, which, having gotten used to the good layout so intuitively before, required a period of adjustment to the new positions without having to look or feel for it.
Anwyay. Anyone have a better method to cure (or prevent) that button-mashing problem?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Plus I never needed to look down at the controller the first time I played a GameCube game. Er...square? What's the intuitive location for a square, and how does that differ from circle?
GameCube has A. First. Primary. Big. Then B. Like A, but less important. Then X, to the right, and Y, up. Or, for the letter-impaired, big circle, small circle, bean one, bean two. All of them EEL different, you know where your fingers are. And you always know that no matter what game you play, A means confirm, B means cancel.
Beats the hell out of faintly printed symbols on small, identical buttons.
Of course, that's in addition to what you said about the fantastic comfort level of the thing. Nine out of ten people who say that beautiful thing is awkward to use haven't given it a chance. Though I loved it right out of the box.
Don't take mine though. Take my little sister's MicroCon(?) version. Now THAT controller is too small.
It would be nice if it didn't look like a little black dildo on my bed when its flipped-over. Seriously.
While I don't have many major qualms over the TiVo remote, one issue I always have with remotes are their physical properties. I own a few pieces of Bang & Olufsen kit, and they built their remote out of Zinc. So not only is the remote cool to the touch when you go to grab it, but it is heavier than a plastic remote as well. I even have it set up now to where I don't have to use my TiVo remote, I can use my Beo4 remote from Bang & Olufsen instead.
The original Palm PDA had similar origins. The creator of the Palm, Jeff Hawkins, carved a block of wood into a size that would comfortably fit into his shirt pocket, and using a "stylus" made from a whittled-down chopstick walked around Palm inc. for a month or two entering dates and phone numbers and taking the thing with him to meetings.
In my opinion, this is the way you should design any technology product; user experience first, technical stuff, code, and engineering later.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
One of the best examples from that Alan Cooper book is alarm clocks.
That's also a perfect example of dysfunctional relationships between user design and the engineer. There are alarm clocks that project the time on the wall or ceiling, alarm clocks that (supposedly) lull me to sleep with white noise or "nature sounds," and alarm clocks that wake me with my favorite CD -- but every blinking last one of them has horrible user design, especially for the intended audience: sleepy, disoriented people who don't have their contacts in. It's pretty amazing to consider just how awkward the things are.
The guts of a better alarm clock: Bigger buttons that are clearly differentiated, even without my glasses on. Decent control over my snooze-ing -- limits on number of times, variable length, etc. would be nice. Readable displays that show different information -- ta dum! -- differently. ("Alarm" is not the same as "PM" and should not be an identical dot on the display.) And so on.
Everyone has one of these, but the business hasn't produced a really good alarm clock at the commodity level for Target to carry. Designers with swooshy plastic cases aren't going to fix the problem by themselves.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Take the remote completely apart, removing every component possible. When disassembling, take notice of where the battery wires and/or springs run so that you can return them to their original positions. Also, note the order in which you removed the parts.
Clean the plastic housings and other case parts like the battery cover with dish soap, water and an old toothbrush. Clean the button side of the button membrane with the toothbrush, but do not get water on the contact pad side. The circuit board usually just needs a good dusting, I typically dry blow it off. (By dry-blow, I mean "don't use spit-or-humidity-laden breath".) And never directly contact any circuit board with the nozzle or brush of a vacuum cleaner, they generate tremendous amounts of static which can blow chips.
If the circuit board is really filthy or sticky, (as in "beer spill",) you will need to clean it and the membrane pads with the soap and toothbrush, too. Make sure you completely and thoroughly dry the parts afterwards. I use a hair dryer. I have heard of people washing the circuit boards in the silverware tray in their dishwasher, but I have not personally tried this. I would also not put any plastic components through a heated dry cycle.
Once the circuit board is clean and dry, take a pink pencil eraser and clean the contact pads. If they are bare copper, polish each one until it is bright and shiny. If they are carbon coated, lightly rub them with the eraser but do not deeply abrade them. You just want to break through any surface dirt, not reshape them. And be careful not to rub so hard as to lift the copper traces from the circuit board, or your remote is probably toast. Afterwards, carefully brush or dry-blow all residue from the polishing. Even the tiniest particles here will cause the buttons to fail.
The buttons, however, are usually where the problem lies. For many years I've used a new U.S. dollar bill (or any new paper currency) as a mild abrasive on the black contacts. Depending on the design of the button and the membrane, you can either grip the individual buttons and rub them one at a time on the abrasive, or you can sometimes place the whole membrane assembly flat on the paper, move it with a circular motion and press the buttons to the paper. Be careful, some membranes are extremely thin and fragile. When rubbing the contacts on the abrasive, it is very important that you maintain the parallel planes between the button pads and the circuit board pads -- if you grind too much off one edge of a button pad, you'll typically just make your problem worse. You want to rub off just enough to break through dirt and/or damage. You may need to abrade more to repair badly rounded or misshapen contacts. When it's properly done, each pad should be flat (or imperceptibly convex) and parallel to the circuit board.
Reassemble the remote, usually in the reverse order in which you took it apart. Carefully route the battery wires and/or springs back through their original positions. Finally, install out-of-the-package fresh batteries.
John