A perfect example of how a product’s experience can be severely damaged by a feature-centric approach instead of a narrative one.

Thanks to Alok, I had the opportunity to get my hands on the new Philips “Living Color” line of LED lamps. He asked for some insight for a similar, yet much more interesting, project of his called Arkalumen.
Here is the beast:

The lamp has an adventurous design, it actually looks like a mix of a harman/kardon speakers and a jelly fish made of (very) cheap plastic. It is quite ugly and feels terribly awkward, but this is not my point.

My point is the remote control (yeah, I don’t like them) and how the user experience has been contaminated by engeneer thinking.

From top to bottom here are the controls: On/Off toggle, color wheel, color saturation (in the center of the wheel), and brightness.

All graphic artists know that a color can be defined using different formulas. A very useful one is called HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness), it is quite easy to understand yet a bit abstract for people (consumers) who legitimately don’t give a damn.

Yet, Philips engineers really figured out that the HSB formula would be the best way to go, and they designed an interface (the remote) to give access to the full spectrum of colors, shades and intensity the lamp is able to produce.

They probably thought that the mere possibility of lightning our living room with an infinite variety of colors is the greatest thing in the world, and it worths being familiar with the HSB concept.

What can we learn from this?

1st: tech specs must be carefully insulated from the user experience to propose real useful features.

2nd: features must be infered from real-life narratives, never from spec sheets.

Philips’ flawed narrative is: “A lamp able to produce every color in the world”. As if we craved the possibility of illuminating our rooms with an infinite palette of colors. As if we were even able to choose a suitable color from a million possibilities (too much choice is an embarassment, “less” is always better than “more”). And eventually: as if light equals color!

A much better narrative would be: “A lamp able to produce every kind of light“, and by “light” I mean the “quality” of light: warmth, coldness, softness, hardness, etc. All the qualities we, human beings, are attaching to the concept of light and the importance they have on our moods and biological rythms.

If Philips had applied this narrative, they would have produced something more inovative, yet closer to our humanity, and much simpler to operate.

Epilogue. As for the remote control, please, no more of that useless c**p ! We are already wasting our evenings looking for the damn TV remote! Now one remote for each lamp in the house? Nooo! Try this instead!

Every once in a while I bump into one of Logitech’s unholly offspring.

Last time was when I discovered that Wired gave 8 of 10 to the hideous Harmony One universal remote control. This kind of device is the ultimate  symptom of a grave illness that plagues most of our home appliances: the feature cancer.

I won’t argue about the value of the device in itself. Maybe it is not that bad after all… But, besides its ugliness, what’s interesting is the failed narrative that supports its inception.

The narrative is: cram all your remote controls in a single big one, and become the master of the living room, yeah! This narrative fails because 1° the thing is a monster of complexity, 2° the thing is always hidden behind a sofa’s cushion like a vulgar non-universal remote control, and 3° because the devices you are supposed to control are themselves suffering from feature cancer, so you’re still trapped.

We have basically swapped a broken system for another one with very questionable gains. The universal remote control concept is an inefficient plaster on an open wound.

As always, the solution will come from a change of narrative. I can suggest this one:

“Get a standard interface to link and access any devices at home”

Thus any devices becomes a member of a system. Our new gizmo, let’s call it Logitech Bridge, will serve features and actions (like “listen to music in room X”, “view Channel Z on screen Y, etc.); to any, say, WiFi or Bluetooth enabled device that will become de-facto universal remote controls.

Maybe Logitech could built this “Bridge” and set a standard for home devices communication via WiFi or Bluetooth, WiFi would be better of course.

Because there is no standard protocol used by home devices (to my knowledge anyway), here is how one may envision a way to make the Bridge a reality:

Step 1: device recognition. The Bridge has a list of all current remote controls on the market. The list is updated live through the internet. Once the Bridge is installed, the user presents all his remote controls to the Bridge. He presses a few buttons, which is enough for the Bridge to recognize the device’s signature and activate its features.

Step 2: operation. The Bridge hosts its own protocol and interface to represent and link togeteher devices and features. This interface is a standard web service usable from any web capable device (computer, smart phones, whatever gadget to come). The user can easily manipulate the devices and their features from any capable device; and the bridge relays user’s inputs back to the home devices using their primitive IR protocols.

Step 3: consecration. Constructors start producing devices compliant with the Bridge’s protocol. They stop appending ugly remote controls to their products (thus producing less crap to be dumped a few years later) and they concentrate on making usable and open products.

I assume that you will think of other narratives more powerfull than this one. That’s the beauty of narratives: you can have several equally valid and elegant narratives, and different interfaces to support them. But the first one who sets a strong narrative and a good interface to support it, will most of the time set a standard.

Sure thing is Logitech, and other universal remote controls constructors, are missing the point in assuming that a physical remote control is going to rule over the legion of remote controls that infest our homes. The solution lies in the metaphoric sphere.

ILoveSketch has been developped by Seok-Hyung Bae of Dynamic Graphic Project in Toronto.
Simply amazing and so elegant.

Thanks to Fred.