It’s always the last button
As we gain knowledge over the years about the things we design, the design get better and better. When you look at the first web sites and compare them to the things we create today you can say that we made some improvements. This rule, that design gets better over the years, does not apply to remote controls for DVD players.
There are a few things I want to do with a remote control for a DVD player: skip unskippable trailers, go to the menu, and play the damn movie, finally. You’d think that three buttons would be sufficient. Mine has 33.
Conventions
A few conventions emerged in the world of DVD remote controls and button placement in general: (1) the Enter button is surrounded by four arrows, (2) the 0 is placed directly below the 8, and (3) play and pause are one and the same button. I do agree that conventions must be challenged every now and then and that they have to be replaced if we come up with something better.
Creativity vs originality
Some designers believe they have to reinvent the wheel every time they design something, even if the thing they created is an oval without an axis. I see that a lot in the web design world where people come up with an alternative way to navigate or an unconventional way to scroll. They think it’s brilliant and original because they’ve never seen it before, but the reason they haven’t seen it before is not because they’re the first to make it up, other people did so before them and found out that it just doesn’t work. Removing the Enter Button from the center and placing it somewhere else is a good example of misplaced originality.
Numbers
I never understood why you’d want numbers on your DVD remote. Apparently you can use them to quickly set the time. A rather obscure function for a DVD player, definitely not worth one third of the space. A good designer would have removed all numbers from the remote, but this bad designer decided that the 0 should be placed below the 7.
Internals
The first thing I do when I start a DVD is press the Menu button (which for some odd reason is not allowed, most of the time). When I press the Menu button I want to be taken to the menu where I can choose to play the damn movie, finally, or choose some useful settings like language or subtitles. I never want to be taken to a different menu. On my new remote there are three menu buttons. I’m sure there’s a rule with a name that describes the following: if you’re not sure which button to press, the correct option is always the last one.
Do you know the difference between the Menu, the Home Menu, and the Top Menu? Me neither. These are internal functions, probably, they are the bowels of you DVD player. We need bowels, without knowing we use them all the time, but only surgeons need to see them in extreme cases, normal people should not have access to them. Well, not too much anyways… So, just give me one Menu button and don’t confuse me.
Random WTF
On my computer there is no difference between Return and Enter, both words are printed on the same button. “Hit Return” or “hit Enter” have exactly the same meaning for most people. Obviously not for DVD remote designers.
Is the DVD/USB button the most important one on the whole remote? Is Stop unrelated to Play? What’s an Angle? What’s Zoom for? And Display? Clear?
The only thing they actually did right on this thing is labeling Prev and Next, I always confuse them with Fast Forward (see the law I defined above). The problem is that it’s not clear if the label is placed below or above the corresponding button, some simple Gestalt theory would have helped here.
Priorities
Sure, DVD players are definitely not the top prioritiy for hardware giants like Pioneer, other crappy systems like Blu-Ray are taking over its place. So I understand that you don’t hire a world class designer to design your remote. What I don’t understand though is that you hire a designer at all. Just copy a remote that already works!
- Vasilis
The great thing about my DVD remote’s multiple menu buttons… they’re all located right next to each other. Brilliant! Great article, this has been on my mind a lot lately
I’m right there with you in my rage against bad remote controls. I have a Samsung TV and Samsung DVD player. The remote for the DVD can control both TV and DVD but has so many essential TV controls missing I can’t do without the TV remote. Conversely the TV remote has buttons for Stop and Play and the like but can’t talk to the DVD. Both are a total abomination of button excess.
One reason that you DVD remote is so badly designed is because it wasn’t designed for your DVD. The internals and button layout was designed to be a generic controller that can be programmed and labelled for any purpose. This is why the number buttons are so prominent at the top: they’re there to enter TV channel number, which is a common use in today’s digital world of 300 channels.
The best TV remote I’ve seen is the Sony RM-816 owned by my father-in-law for his ageing CRT TV. It’s quite large and chunky which for his 80-year old fat thumbs and failing eye site is perfect, but best of all it’s REVERSIBLE. Yes, reversible. The inside un-clips and slides out of the casing. On one side is a simplified set of big-buttoned basic controls (Volume/Channel Up/Down, Power On/Off, 4 Teletext colour buttons) and the other is the “Power User” every button you’d ever need to do stuff you hardly ever need to do like retune or adjust the colour/contrast and control the VHS tape recorder. AWESOME!
This photo shows both sides: http://fanzo.org/remote/wp-content/gallery/sony/SONY%20RM816.jpg and the empty case.
@Peter Duerden I didn’t know DVD remotes are generic controllers, thanks for pointing that out. And that SONY remote looks clever.
I would actually prefer if they’d ditch the whole “DVD menu” altogether.
I never bother anymore to select subtitles in the DVD menu. Most of them are tricky to navigate. Not only that, but by the time you get there chances are you’ve seen all the best bits of the film already.
My Blu-Ray (and I suspect this goes for most players) has an in-film option menu. It may look ugly, but it’s fast and clear.
I think the Sony RM-816 would also score a few points for WAI-ARIA if it were a web app! The main buttons are clearly distinguishable by touch.
I also forgot to mention about “unskippable trailers”. No fault of your remote – blame the DVD producers. Part of the standard for video DVDs allows for initial chapters that auto-play and can’t be skipped; the idea being they should be used very frugally for the display of a short legal and/or copyright statement. But of course marketing gets wind of this and thinks “Great! A way we can force users to watch adverts and trailers!” Although the Skip button won’t work you’ll likely find the Fast Forward does. Press it a couple of times and maybe you can skim through at x64 speed! There are some DVD players, the sort that play DivX/XViD DVD-R natively, that are able to ignore this irritating usability blight ;)
I got so sick of some DVDs my kids like to watch regularly but take a good 5 minutes to get to the film that I created “pirate” copies of just the main feature – no adverts, no menus, just auto-play straight to the film.
BTW Like the RWD on your site. Clean. Minimal.
Good article on an huge frustration that is constantly overlooked.
While it’s not exactly a DVD remote, I have a Verizon P265 remote for Fios and it’s horrible. The Enter+4 circle is huge and takes up so much space and the up/down work the OPPOSITE direction of channel. The favorites button is tiny (with a heart icon) and located between down and last. One would think that at least they’d make the On-Demand button bigger but alas, no. The on-screen menuing, while better than what Cox offered, is likewise horrible.
I also have an old Motorola DVD player that has a remote with 30 sequentially arranged, identically sized buttons in a 5×6 pattern. In 8 years I still haven’t figured out what the top entire row does, nor why the play and pause (separate buttons) are in the second row, making them difficult to hit. And likewise, why are there numeric keys – the face of the player does not even have a clock. So in the 8 years before my dog decided it was her new toy, I used play, pause, stop and eject. Why can’t I opt for a 4-key remote?