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"Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

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Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#11

Post by mdonahoe »

feverishaaron wrote: post #10
smartkids wrote: post #9

Solution: Let these interface gimmicks be the stuff of tech conventions and demos, and never part of any mass-produced product. But maybe some marketing folks, seeing the success of Apple, have reasoned that these gimmicks can sell products in the short-term, at least until consumers discover the problems with them. At the end of this era of tapping and rubbing little screens with our fat, dirty fingers, we may be re…

Constantly fumbling with; forgetting or losing the PDA stylus – happened to the PDA stylus.

The other thing removing the stylus did was force the software to go in a completely different direction.

With a fat finger, the ui can't look and work the same as mouse driven ui as it could with a stylus.

Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#12

Post by uptown »

RossDM wrote: post #5
notatoad wrote: post #4

What is this referring to? Is there an actual product that allows you to flick to TV and provides no other UI for that functionality?

Not sure how this relates to the real world experience, but there's a Samsung Phone TV ad that shows a businessman flicking his presentation onto the conference screen.

Samsung has two commercials airing currently with new forms of interaction ... might be the Galaxy S3 (I'm not sure). One example shows the user dismissing a call by speaking to the phone while a call is coming in. The other commercial shows that you can take a screen-shot by waving your hand over the device whenever - kind of ironic since screenshots from Android devices was always a pain back when I owned one.

Maybe they both work flawlessly - I don't know, but both seem like they could easily misfire when you intended to do something completely different with your device.

Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#14

Post by garrettlarson »

smartkids wrote: post #9

Solution: Let these interface gimmicks be the stuff of tech conventions and demos, and never part of any mass-produced product. But maybe some marketing folks, seeing the success of Apple, have reasoned that these gimmicks can sell products in the short-term, at least until consumers discover the problems with them. At the end of this era of tapping and rubbing little screens with our fat, dirty fingers, we may be re…

It takes two hands to hold a device and a stylus.

Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#15

Post by confluence »

mdonahoe wrote: post #8

3 years ago, I made a prototype for LG of a social remote control. It allowed anyone in the room with a web browser (including smart phones) to send videos to the tv. It was great for group tv watching, since it gives everyone the ability to search simultaneously for a video, instead of instructing the one guy with the remote where to go. Anyway, LG wasnt interested until I made a super gimmicky way of sending videos…

Why not start with the really awesome remote control - and move toward your final idea?

Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#17

Post by sgdesign »

I think you always need a phase of experimenting new ideas before people find out what works and what doesn't. Ideally, those failed experiments would stay in-house and never reach the market, but it's not always easy to know which ideas are good...

So anyway, since you never know what might eventually come out of it, I'm personally grateful for the existence of "flick to tv" gimmicks.

As long as I don't have to use them myself, of course.

Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#18

Post by mdonahoe »

confluence wrote: post #15
mdonahoe wrote: post #8

3 years ago, I made a prototype for LG of a social remote control. It allowed anyone in the room with a web browser (including smart phones) to send videos to the tv. It was great for group tv watching, since it gives everyone the ability to search simultaneously for a video, instead of instructing the one guy with the remote where to go. Anyway, LG wasnt interested until I made a super gimmicky way of sending videos…

Why not start with the really awesome remote control - and move toward your final idea?

Selling a specialized device for tv watching undermines the purpose of my social remote idea. Your friends wont have one, so they can't participate as easily as they could if it was a webapp.

I suppose you could buy 4 of them, like I (an only child) did with Nintendo 64 controllers so that my friends could always play.

Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#19

Post by ripperdoc »

He is simply listing the challenges any designer would face to make a simple yet obvious feature that just works. It is NOT describing a reason to "go back to buttons" or do something in the traditional way. This is where home electronics need to go - where you can interact with them directly instead through some button interface. If I direct my phone at the TV, both the phone and the TV should know that this is happening and depending on context, do something or offer a choice. Another example is touching your phone to your computer, etc.

The challenge, apart from making the design intuitive, is for the devices that take part in this form of interaction to understand the intent of the user.

Re: "Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today

#20

Post by FixThisPOSSite »

acgourley wrote: post #13

Most gesture controls fit in this category of jetpack design, too.

Yep. Undiscoverable crap that's less efficient and effective than the "regular" way.

One of the very few exceptions is two-fingered scrolling on trackpads. This is the first genuinely valuable use of multitouch I've seen.

The use of the term "jetpack design" is hypocritical when talking about this topic, however, since it's as meaningless and obscure as the designs we're complaining about.

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