Funny you should say that…we hardly ever used that VCR, since it was an older one and on our upstairs TV. We had of course upgraded, like good little consumers, which made using this older one even more difficult, because on the rare occasion I wanted to use it, the remote was NEVER where it was supposed to be (like, on top of the VCR), and no one had seen it for months. :mad:
I personally wouldn’t want to be limited to a 5-minute resolution, although I’m sure it wouldn’t make me too early or too late. It just seems to violate a good user premise: Never remove control from the user’s hands.
But I wish alarm clocks had setting controls that could go backwards as well as forwards. Many is the time that I try to set the hour and it jumps ahead too far. Then I have to keep pressing to go around again. Making a toggle switch that you press one direction for up and the other for down would not require an engineering revolution.
Another example of this single-mode concept. Sometimes the DVD player takes a while to figure out how to read a disk just inserted. It is locked in a loop and will not respond to ANY keys pressed during that time. I’m sure the software has a loop like “Test for condition X. If not condition X, repeat”. If the disk cannot be read at all, this is an endless loop, or what is called a “deadly embrace”. The only way out is to power down, but the power switch doesn’t work, you have to yank the cord. Idiotic!
Ah, minimalist printer controls and displays. We have a HP Laserjet 1200. It has one button and 2 LEDs. None of them are labeled with anything. I know if the top LED isn’t green then something is amiss. That’s about it. I guess the function of the one button depends on the state the printer is in. If there is a paper jam I press the button to get it to start printing again. That’s all I ever use the button for.
And external hard drives…silly me, it seems like all they would need is a power LED and activity LED. But no, our Maxtor OneTouch drives have a blue line split into 2 segments. The whole thing can be solid, the whole thing blink, or half of it blink. Very obscure, who knows exactly what each pattern means? Power and activity. That’s all I need.
We have an alarm clock that has buttons that allow one to go forward fast, forward slowly, and backwards slowly when setting the time. I do love that feature. I wish they all had it.
I would bet that you can scroll to other parts of the picture using the direction buttons. Have you tried that?
And the reason for zoom? For me, I have a small TV. If an important part of the plot is the words on a letter or something, I can pause and zoom in to read it. It also helps when the credits are in a micro font.
This is not a good user premise. In fact, I think it’s responsible for a lot of bad design. In most applications, the user does not need control over everything, and the desire to allow the user to control everything results in an obtuse, overly-complicated interface that makes it hard to control anything.
Do you really need 1-minute resolution in your alarm clock? Why? Hell, one might argue that all you need is 15-minute resolution. When was the last time you set your clock to wake you up at 4:03 AM, and why was that so critical compared to 4:00 AM or 4:05 AM?
Or, how about a DVD player? We don’t need any options here at all. Play, pause, fast-forward. Some buttons to move through the DVD menus. That’s it.
The incredible array of configurable options/choices are the reason why so many people hate consumer electronics - and the only company that understands this is Apple.
Admittedly my eyesight is hardly that of a cat, but I bought myself a clock radio/CD player alarm that features autodimming numbers. So when you look at it in the dark the numbers are too faint to read the time and I have to put the light on. During the day WHEN I NEVER NEED TO LOOK AT IT FOR THE TIME it is readable from across the room.
Our old stove/oven. It had a little computer in there instead of the old-style dials. It also had a little drainage hole on the stovetop, right above the motherboard. So, if your water boiled over, as inevitably happens once in a while, liquid would go down the drainage hole and drip onto the computer innards. Yeah, that’s clever.
We have a new stove now and I love it.
Try putting the mouse on the left side of the keyboard. The G-H pair can then be perfectly centered in front of you that way.
Of course it only works well if you’re left-handed. 
More stupidity in design, but not electronic… My mother’s fridge has a grating at the bottom of the freezer compartment. The slots are deep and just wide enough to catch all sorts of gunk, but there’s no way to clean them except to disassemble the freezer or use a box of Q-tips. She swears that only a man could have designed that, and speaking as a man, I have to agree.
I’ll give you a different example. In our new City Hall, they have the latest technology in the bathrooms. Auto-flushing toilets & urinals and auto-on/off faucets in the sinks.
So I put my hand under the faucet, and it turns on, then off right away. I move my hand a little, it goes on, then off. After some time, I am able to get enough water to make the soap work, then I have to resort to this little hand-dance again for rinsing. This takes quite a while.
So after a few visits to the bathroom, I figure out where the sensor is (it’s not obvious) and I find if I keep my hand close enough to it, but not where it is normal to be, I can control the water flow in a standard manner. This problem occurred because the designer removed control from the user. It would have been better if a standard valve were used, as I wouldn’t have to go thru the learning curve.
In contrast, the urinals and toilets, while ordinarily automatic, have a button for manual flushing. And yes, there are times when the automatic mode doesn’t work and the button is the salvation. This is an example of an acceptable design and gives the advantages of both modes. Nothing is removed from the user.
Yes, because I want it. Who are you as the designer, to tell me that I don’t? If you argue that it takes more hardware or software to provide that (it doesn’t), I would pay another dollar to have it. And if the user wants it, it’s just good marketing to provide it. YMMV.
Certainly the most commonly used buttons should be prominent and easiest to use, if that’s what you are saying.
I have a dedicated Mac Mini as DVD player, so that my wife can use our Home Theatre. I’ve replaced 4-5 50-button remotes with the Apple remote that has 6 buttons.
That there seems like a reason to purchase a new microwave!
Well, since it’s a built-in, and would cost in the range of $3k to replace, and I’d probably have to modify my kitchen cabinets to change to a different model… I guess I’ll just deal.
Obviously, judgement has to be used. You can’t remove all control from the user. This example is akin to a DVD player that never lets you pause the movie - obviously, that would be going a bit overboard.
I’m telling you you don’t need it because it makes setting the alarm clock take five times as long for the normal people who don’t care about waking up at precisely 7:36 AM.
I mean, if it’s more choice you want, why stop at just minutes? Why not allow us to be woken up at 7:36:12.5922 AM? Who are those designers to tell us we don’t need sub-millisecond precision in our alarm clocks?
Computers are a perfect example of this. 90% of the options you see in computer software are there because an engineer thought to himself: “Now, what’s the best way to do this? I’m too lazy to think about it, so I know, I’ll just make it an option, and the user can figure it out!”
A perfect example is backup software. The only serious backup software for Mac OS X used to be Retrospect. It was very powerful, flexible software, and it let you control every single aspect of the backup process. Hundreds of options, about whether to verify files have been backed up successfully, how to back up open files, what files to back up, when to run, etc. Pages and pages of configuration screens.
Recently, Apple introduced their backup software, Time Machine. It has two options in the configuration panel: an On/Off switch, and a list where you can drag files that you do not want to back up. When you plug in a hard drive, it asks you if you want to use it for backups, and if so, it will run an incremental backup every hour. It automatically saves the hourly backups for the past hour, daily backups for the past month, and as many weekly backups as it can fit. All with no configuration required - it just works.
For 99% of the people out there, that’s good enough. It’s a perfect example of what consumer-level software should be. Hell, I’m a computer science graduate student at MIT, and it’s the first backup software I’ve used with any regularity. It’s not that I didn’t have the expertise to deal with Retrospect, but I just didn’t want to spend the time tweaking the thousand different Retrospect options to get it to work properly. I don’t have the time to become an expert in every single piece of software, every single gadget that I use daily.
I don’t want to become an ergonomics expert (adjustable office chairs), video technician (DVD playback settings), user interface designer (Linux desktop themes), and so on.
It is easy for technically-minded people who enjoy tinkering with things to say “But I want to be able to turn de-interlacing on and off!” That’s nice, but most people don’t. They just want to turn the DVD player on and watch a movie.
Hey, that is brilliant! That’s the perfect alarm clock for all those people who can’t wake up in the morning and just keep hitting the snooze button over and over. An alarm clock that won’t let you!
When I know mine has the exactly correct time, I will set the alarm for times such as 05:59. I feel very disoriented if I end up hearing the main news headlines through a just-awakening fog.
Also, mine seems to have the change-time-fast/change-time-slow speeds just right. The worst are when it’s quicker to repeatedly press the button than to hold it and wait for it to scroll through to 60.
The DVD/VCR is a pain, though. It should be a matter of turn on, put in disc, press play on remote? No, before you press play, you have to press the ‘DVD’ button on the remote first. Every time you turn it on. It won’t remember what you last did, nor will it realise that there’s a disc there and no video tape.
Our current DVD player is a carousel type. It has recently decided that it WILL NOT open until it has checked the entire thing several times to get a grasp on which slots have DVDs in them. Should you try to open the tray before it has decided it is ready, it will immediately close again. This can get especially aggravating when there are no DVDs in it, because the player will not believe that it is empty, and will check several times.
Another one: one of the TVs has a built in DVD player. In order to play the DVD, you must switch it to DVD function. Should you switch back to TV mode, the disk will stop spinning, and you have to wait for it to “load” again (this takes forever). This TV has also screwed up the AUX inputs. There are apparently three options somewhere, but in reality there are only two input jacks. This means that any device actually plugged in will show up on aux2 or three, never on one.
You should be able to change the voice mail alert tone to vibrate or off in the phone’s settings, unless it’s an older model I suppose.
I’ve never had a problem getting VCRs to work, in fact I am always the one that family members & friends come to for help in setting their machines, however one thing that annoys me is how on some models of VCR, the front panel will only cycle through CLOCK or FF/RW/PLAY, without ever showing just how much tape has been watched or rewound. So if you try to rewind 20 minutes, you have to use the on-screen display function because it will not show the elapsed time on the front!
Sometimes I like to hit mute, turn on captions and play radio or music over the TV. This apparently is a habit the Samsung people don’t wish to encourage. On my Samsung 17" LCD, the caption function cannot be set to turn on automagically when mute is pressed. Nor is there a caption button on the remote. You need to doink doink doink through an onscreen menu to turn captions on, a process requiring about eleven keystrokes. Then you need to doink doink doink through it all again to turn captions off.
Making a remote control out of black plastic makes it damn-near impossible to find, in a softly-lit room!