The Sad State of TV User Interfaces*
Having been laid up for the past week or two, I’ve spent a lot of time watching DirecTV, both live and recorded. Pictured above is the beast I’ve been using to navigate the airwaves. In case it’s not obvious from looking at the thing or from your own personal experiences, it’s terrible.
Here are a few examples of how. First of all, pressing Guide doesn’t take you to the guide—it takes you to a menu page with various guides listed on it—All Channels, Movie & Event Channels, Sports Channels, etc. To get to the usual all-channel guide, you have to press Guide twice. This gets annoys me every single time I use the guide—and I use it often.
Also annoying: if you punch in number, say 50, and then hit the giant Select button, it won’t go to channel 50 (only Enter does that). It will instead give you the “error” beep. Nothing happens for a second, but the 50 you punched in hangs there, and finally it does change to channel 50. Unless you press exit or punch in more numbers. What a mess.
A DVR with no 30-second skip? Garbage.
The software interface is also to blame here—the menus are slow and unresponsive, occasionally leading to accidentally repeated commands.
Perhaps most glaring is the large, unfriendly size and layout of the remote. I’m of the opinion that a good remote should fit comfortably in a normal-sized human hand, and that it should be operable purely by touch—in one hand—after a reasonable period of practice. Using a remote control should be second nature; it should require no extraneous thought or effort. The DirecTV remote, as well as most others out there today, fails this test pretty miserably. (I’ve got Time Warner cable back at Indie Rock HQ, and it’s not any better.)
More than any single concern, there’s simply a multitude of tiny frustrations that add up to a wholly unsatisfying user experience. I understand there are more and more features creeping into TVs and home-entertainment centers these days, but I don’t think a good remote is too much to ask.
*Update: Hmm, what about something like this? Cute, but I still think you should be able to use a remote without looking down at it.
