The geek factor
Thursday, 21May2015 Filed in: Design
It’s about expectations and hard wiring.
Put a TV remote in the hands of an everyday person and they don’t want that many extra buttons. Channel up and channel down, they get that. Although sometimes they wonder why the channel up and channel down buttons are on the wrong side. Their last remote had volume up and volume down on the left, not channels. Why can’t the “companies” just all make their remotes the same?
Now a geek will look at a remote as a challenge. Those number buttons, wouldn’t it be more logical to make “!” the favorite channel, “2” the next, and so on. It would be easy enough to add another key to push before the numbers if you really wanted to manually punch out the channels.
It’s a completely different set of assumptions.
The average person wants their gadgets and gizmos to work out of the box with no tweaking and no uncertainty.
The geek will want to tweak and improve.
It should be easy enough to design a device that could do both. But instead we’re stuck with either/or.
But what do I know? I’m the guy who thought there should be battery back-up for the VCR clock.
Put a TV remote in the hands of an everyday person and they don’t want that many extra buttons. Channel up and channel down, they get that. Although sometimes they wonder why the channel up and channel down buttons are on the wrong side. Their last remote had volume up and volume down on the left, not channels. Why can’t the “companies” just all make their remotes the same?
Now a geek will look at a remote as a challenge. Those number buttons, wouldn’t it be more logical to make “!” the favorite channel, “2” the next, and so on. It would be easy enough to add another key to push before the numbers if you really wanted to manually punch out the channels.
It’s a completely different set of assumptions.
The average person wants their gadgets and gizmos to work out of the box with no tweaking and no uncertainty.
The geek will want to tweak and improve.
It should be easy enough to design a device that could do both. But instead we’re stuck with either/or.
But what do I know? I’m the guy who thought there should be battery back-up for the VCR clock.
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