Remote Controls, Babysitters, and User Experience

February 2, 2009 Justin Garrity — 0 comments

Years ago, when my wife and I were new parents, we decided to go out on a date one evening and leave the care of our son to a babysitter for the first time.  We were nervous parents and our heads were filled with visions of everything that could go wrong, nearly convincing ourselves to abandon the plans and stay home.

We had to go out and decided we had to get over our fears.  We started by writing down all of the emergency information we could think of on a single page for the babysitter.  This included phone numbers for our cell phones, doctors, the hospital, poison control, grandparents, friends in the area, and anything else we could think of.  We listed our son’s favorite foods, when he should be put down for bed, and what his favorite bedtime stories and lullabies were.  We prepared, packaged, and labeled food and placed it in the refrigerator, made up a bottle of milk, laid out his pajamas, as well as many other preparations.  Again, we were nervous.

When the babysitter arrived, we walked her through the house, showed her all the preparations, and went over and over the emergency information a few times.  This all took less than ten minutes.  She seemed to understand it all and her let us know that she had done this before and everything would be OK.

We were feeling better about the situation and on the way out the door I explained that the TV was set up for them to watch the Jungle Book on the DVD player.  I showed her how to control volume on the one remote and the power for the TV on the other.  She asked me if she could watch TV after my son went down to bed.  I said it was OK and showed her how to switch from the DVD over to the TiVo.  What followed was 15 to 20 minutes of teaching her how to use the remotes.  When we returned home that evening, the babysitter was sitting on the couch reading a book.  She said she tried but she couldn’t get the TV to work right.

In my professional career, I’ve often referred to this experience as a way to think about usability challenges.  Each device that added to my ultimate home theatre experience (the TiVo, the DVD player, the large TV, the receiver, the iPod dock, and the game system) introduced a cost.  The cost was the complexity each component added to the system.  What was difficult to see until I tried to walkthrough it with the babysitter, was how much easier it was for me to use because I was the one who set it up.  She had no idea how all the cords and wires worked behind the components so knowing what buttons on the six remotes to push was difficult to grasp.  In fact, learning what to ignore was almost as important as learning what was relevant.

The answer to the usability problem with my home theatre setup wasn’t to buy a cheap all-in-one DVD TV combo just so I ended up with only one remote.  In fact, the home theatre system I have today is even more complex and higher end than it was then.  The answer was a breakthrough product called the Harmony Remote.  This breakthrough product changed the whole paradigm of what a universal remote should do and how it should be configured.  Setup is a breeze and once it is done, anyone visiting our home can easily navigate our HD in-home theatre.

I am excited to be part of the WebTrends team.  I was a passionate user that joined to make a difference.  Improving the user experience while retaining the powerful features that makes our products unique is my challenge.  I know it is possible.  I have a remote control to prove it.

CATEGORIES: Customer Experience Industry Perspectives Inside Webtrends

TAGS: usability UX