The forgotten link: hardware UX.
My youngest daughter Jade, who is six, recently said that she didn’t understand why the TV remote has numbers on it. Surely it should have letters, she said, because that way you can tell it which program you want to watch.
As children do, she’s found an obvious flaw that’s right under our noses. There is absolutely no reason for numbers on a remote. In an on-demand world, we’re no longer loyal to channels, we’re loyal to programming. In addition, the number designations actually mean nothing. Every different city, cable or satellite company assigns channels to completely different numbers. So, even if you’re looking for a specific channel, an alpha-based search is far more useful.
Clearly most set top boxes and even most televisions are now intelligent enough to translate an alpha request into the appropriate numerical address, however none of them do and even Tivo – which is widely seen as having the best UI of any of the solutions requires you to navigate an onscreen keyboard instead of putting the keyboard on the remote.
I think that the problem that Jade identified is actually a larger one, which is that the human interfaces to hardware have not kept pace with the developments in hardware (and software). This feels like a problem that probably affects many areas. In writing this I am looking at my telephone which suffers from the very same problem. Numbers are easy for machines to recognise which is why we made people remember them early on, but today any phone is probably smart enough to translate a name into a phone number (this is why Google didn’t go far enough with Google voice – why make me remember yet another number, just tie all my numbers to my name!).
It feels like this is an area where someone can make a big difference. My wife has urged me to patent this idea, but because I’m too lazy, I’m hoping that this blog post will suffice should anyone ever make any money off this.