This was originally posted on my Tumblr site: see the video at http://tuckertuesday.tumblr.com/
In my time supporting automation systems I often have had the compliant come back that the interfaces are too daunting, confusing. Such complaints are so common that ICIA published a paper “Dashboard for Control’ to act as a template for interface design. The documents are more ‘like guidelines then actual rules..” as Barbossa would say. My current interface uses the System Builder template which as Dashboard concepts built right in.
Still I get people who are either taken back by a touch screen just at the concept or cannot make sense of ‘all the buttons’. To prove that it can be intuitive, I showed my 3 yr old twice how to turn the system on and find ‘his’ page. All the icons are graphical. As you can see my 3 yr old can easily navigate the touchpanel. He is so comfortable with the interface that he has begun to teach my 1 year old.
That is fine enough, you may say, but it is like the old joke: the package said ‘so easy a 5 year old can assemble it’, so would someone get me a 5 year old to put this together?! Granted children absorb new concepts, just look at how all the kids who watch ‘ni hao kai lan’ can recite the colors in Chinese. But, it does not have to be that difficult. Simple straight forward concepts make the transition from one form factor to another more about getting a task done than the bells and whistles.
About 6 months ago my wife’s mother watched the kids for us, when asked by my son if he could watch TV grandma took one look and said she did not know how. “oh, I so you” was his response and he promptly turned on the AV system and choose Disney. Once he taught the grandma, the device was not so fearful. Now, partly based on her comfort level with our home system grandma has downloaded her first songs from the itunes store and connected her Nano to her car’s in board connector. ‘It’s so cool and easy’ she recently told me. Custom design is a wonderful thing but if it is complicated no one but the person who created will use it. I would love to spend hour’s custom designing a touch screen theme but if I uploaded it to the panel I would have my wife calling me all day asking where to find this or that function. KISS rule applies to all our designs.
I too am a Crestron programmer and I struggle with maintaining a balance between creativity and usability. It's frustrating sometimes because I reuse the same interface again and again but you know what? It works.
My work is limited to the commercial world now. When I worked on residential projects we only had a few people that would ever use a given interface: it would be customized to their tastes.
With commercial installations you must program for the masses. This doesn't necessarily mean a least common denominator style but, rather, a style that communicates the maximum amount of information with the least amount of distracting elements. I suppose you could call it a Back to Basics approach.
The ICIA did a great job with the Dashboard but I have my bones to pick with it. I have institutional clients that have had user interfaces from us for 15+ years. I'm not about to start rearranging the buttons now to fit into the ICIA format.
Don't get me wrong: I don't believe that the ICIA expects us to rock the boat of existing installations. Rather we're slowly implementing some of those suggestions for new clients.
I've found that a great number of problems attributed to Crestron are actually attributable to the programmer's inability to understand the audio/video system. A good Windows application developer doesn't necessarily make a good Crestron developer. It boggles the mind that some business owners expect them to be.
A good Crestron (or AMX for that matter) programmer needs to understand the client's perspective. A homeowner wants to "watch a movie" whereas many programmers interpret this as the homeowner wanting to "go into DVD mode."
Great blog!
Jonathan
Posted by: Jonathan Danforth | February 18, 2009 at 09:22 AM