New Scientist magazine has a good interview with roving Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase. He travels around the world observing and photographing how people live their lives, and how mobile phones fit into that. It’s kind of amazing that Nokia allows him to blog about it as much as he does, normally a large corporation would keep a much tighter lid on this kind of research. But he’s a good ambassador for the brand, and I’m sure there’s plenty he doesn’t make public (including the all-important conclusions!).

I appreciate Chipchase’s modesty: he avoids the term anthropologist as he’s not trained as one (a refreshing change from some other people who have adopted that bandwagon label), and he also doesn’t get too caught up in only seeing the world from the point of view of a mobile phone. As he says on his blog “life is way more interesting than little lumps of plastic and metal”.

His blog is well worth checking out if you haven’t seen it already, with lots of fascinating photos of details of life from around the world. 

I recently purchased a universal remote control to replace the three other remotes that littered our living room. Both the remotes for the Comcast cable box and Marantz AV receiver were theoretically universal, but none really functioned as such as they were too hard to set up and too hard to use. So we did the familiar remote juggle.

Hoping to fix this I selected the Logitech Harmony One for various reasons which I’ll go into. (I should also note that Logitech is a client of frog design, where I work, but I’m writing this purely as a happy customer.)

I have long been skeptical of universal remotes as they never really seemed to be, well, universal. I’ve done a lot of research for projects over the years where I visit people in their homes to look at how they use technology and a typical scenario these days is that each TV set-up has three to five remotes layed out in front of the couch. On top of that, many houses have several TV’s, each with their own stack of cable/satellite box, DVD, and perhaps a receiver. So that can add up to a dozen or more remotes per household, all of which work differently. It’s a complete mess.

But every time I talked with someone who’d bought a universal remote, they still had the other remotes hanging around as there were one or two buttons on each they couldn’t get to work on the “universal.” I remember one gentleman who had an all-Sony set-up and his Sony universal remote couldn’t even control everything right.

But I can happily say that in the two months since we’ve had the Logitech that we have not touched our other remotes a single time. It mostly was a good experience to set up and is generally a delightful experience to use. Why?

Design

First from an aesthetic point of view it is quite elegant in a piano-black looking finish and a sleek shape that fits well in the hand (though it is so blobby that it sometimes is a bit slippery to orient quickly, despite being rubberized on the back surface). The buttons are mostly well positioned and fall readily to hand, though the remote is very long and I have to hike it forward in my hand to use the channel buttons, which makes it a bit unbalanced. My wife in particular likes the fact that it lights up when you pick it up or jostle it, which gives it an “alive” feel. Since both of us are designers, these things matter.

Interface

Speaking of which, all keys are lit, as of course is the nice color LCD display at the top. The UI is graphically rich, and the touchscreen makes navigation simpler than the older Logitech remotes that had buttons on the side. This is closer to an iPhone, whereas the older ones were like ATMs.

While the remote itself is very slick, the UI of the PC application used to configure it is aesthetically a 90’s throwback that looks like paintings of the set-up done by the brother of a start-up’s founder. It is probably legacy from when Logitech bought (start-up) Harmony to create its own remote control division, and they haven’t got around to updating the look to the Logitech corporate style. While friendly looking it is incongruous.

Ease of use

Logitech uses an activity-based approach for doing most things which works well. If you want to watch TV, you select the activity on the screen called “Watch TV”, and so on. This makes it easy to quickly get down to the business of couch potato-ing. The remote takes care of turning on all the components needed for that activity, in optimum order, and switching any inputs/outputs as necessary, and doing things like changing the surround sound setting. This takes a few seconds sometimes, during which you have to keep the remote pointed at the components or you risk the process not finishing and you having to do things manually (the horror!). The remote is charged with a cradle and so it needs to be put back in that every day or two, depending on how much you’ve been using it.

Universal

It truly does seem to be universal. Most of my AV components are new so those are expected. What wasn’t expected was that it had both by 1980’s vintage Harman Kardon Citation 23 tuner and Acoustic Research turntable in its database. The turntable is not remote-enabled of course, being a completely manual unit, but because of the activities-oriented approach in order for me to listen to it I needed to create an activity so that the Logitech can switch the receiver to the right input.

Set-up

To set up all the activities on the remote you connect it with a USB cable to a PC and then run an application (Mac or Windows) that asks you a series of questions to determine your system configuration. It’s sort of like TurboTax for your home theater. Logitech recommended setting aside about an hour for the set-up, and I think it took me a bit longer than that. Once you’ve got your initial set-up complete you try the remote out and see if everything works. If not then you go through a diagnostic to make modifications.

Most of the stuff was fairly straightforward, but two things took most of the time. The most infuriating one had nothing to do with the remote, and that was trying to figure out seemingly conflicting messages about which HDMI connector was being used by the TV (the receiver has 2 outputs). But the process was not helped by some diagnostic menus that were a bit confusing once I had to dig in and adjust some parameters. Once this was sorted the turntable presented the other challenge: the remote has no specific activity for listening to records. It turned out however, that my model of turntable was listed in the cassette deck activity! Weird.

How about downsides? It has a few

Device functions

While the activities are great for most things, sometimes you need to dive in and adjust a specific function on a single device. To do this you have to step through a series of screens of on-screen buttons, which can get to be numerous (8 in the case of my receiver). The buttons are labelled in alphabetical order, which means that power cycle (forcing a device on which didn’t come on) can be several screens deep. The names of the buttons don’t always map to what they are called on the device either. Better prioritization and clustering of these would be appreciated. Luckily you don’t have to do it very often.

Price

It is expensive at $250 list (though it can be had for much less). It’s not the spendiest remote Logitech makes, but it’s up there. It’s easily the best looking though (there’s that designer thing again), and the touch-screen makes it worth the premium. My wife had a bit of sticker shock (and I ordered with some hesitation, given my doubt about universal remotes), but now we are both completely sold on it.

By the way, an instrumental factor in me buying this remote was a user-submitted video on Amazon. It was very in-depth and really provided a good overview of how the remote would work. The reviewer Heath L. Buckmaster should get a commission from Logitech or Amazon.

Related Post: Competitor for the Worst User Experience

I was recently shopping for a new bike helmet and I was struck by a realization: Is there another category with lower differentiation amongst the different brands?

Above is a representative sampling of helmets from four different manufacturers: Bell, Giro, Louis Garneau, and Specialized. I’ve removed the logos. Can you tell one brand from another? I certainly can’t. (Answer at the end of the post)

The bike helmet category, so far as I can see, is primarily style driven, as all the helmets have to meet minimum safety standards determined by a couple of third party organizations. The differences in weight and comfort between the lower end and upper end helmets (a price range of $40 to over $200) are marginal. The major difference is in the amount of cooling — the upper end helmets have larger vent holes — but contrary to a few years ago even the middling helmets are good in this respect. The $60 Bell I picked up cools much better than my five year old $100+ Specialized.

A significant incentive in many bike purchases is what pro’s are using, and having bragging rights to the latest gear. In that case you would expect more obvious differences at the upper end — if there’s isn’t a strong visible tiering, or a strong brand identity through the product design, then only a tiny number of people will be able to spot that you’re wearing the latest and greatest, which dilutes the incentive to spring for the expensive stuff.

Bell Sports owns Giro, who was the originator of the bare-styrofoam helmet that dramatically reduced weight over the older style that had a hard plastic shell. Typically when a company acquires another one they want to keep a differentiation between them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Based on my experience, the two brands seem tailored for slightly different shape heads (Giro = rounder, Bell = elliptical). Other than that they are largely the same. Between the two of them they dominate the category; I don’t have stats but I’m guessing 80%. Perhaps they’re just a bit complacent due to their almost-monopoly?

It’s odd that in such a style driven category that all the manufacturers have basically converged on a single aesthetic and stuck to it. In fairness, designing anything to go on the head is a tricky and highly constrained exercise and one of the most difficult things to design, but this level of conformity is still very odd. How about a little choice so we don’t all look like racer wannabe’s with Trilobites stuck to our skulls?

(Brands answer, clockwise from top-left: Giro, Specialized, Louis Garneau, Giro, Bell, Bell)

If you’re a parent, here’s a cool new product: Cucuyo. It’s portable baby changing station and diaper bag. It was designed by a couple of friends of mine, husband and wife team Ana Reza and Page Hadden (she formerly of frog design and Pottery Barn, he of Timbuk2 and Lowe Pro, so they know their stuff). It folds up sort of like a burrito, and unrolls into a pad for doing diaper changes, and has a pouch for storing new and old diapers. As they say, there’s no need to have a dedicated diaper bag, as this fulfills the role. Plus it comes in a bunch of cool colors and patterns.

If you are in the business of designing products, have I got a book for you: It’s called Manufacturing Processes for Design Professionals ($60 on Amazon). This may sound expensive until you see it: it’s a monster of a book at 500+ pages and with 1200 color illustrations and weighs several pounds.

A huge range of materials and manufacturing processes are covered in detail, richly communicated with great on-the-shop-floor photos taken by the author himself, Rob Thompson, who is an industrial designer. There are sections on familiar categories like metals…

And plastics…

…and less familiar ones like caning: 

This is really a breathtaking effort in its scope and detail. Highly recommended.