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

 

<grumpy>

I’m fed up with advertising in places where you are held captive, like movie theaters. I’m going to call it “indentured advertude” - advertising where you are held hostage to look at it and you know all it’s doing is paying for the crappy experience you’re having.

I’m fed up with advertising appearing on every conceivable flat surface that you might possibly look at, like grocery store floors.

It is oppressive, aggressive and reeks of desparation.

I found a new example this week that manages to combine all of these. With oil closing in on $150 a barrel and people not flying due to high ticket prices and the ever worsening experience of actually getting on a plane, US Airways is getting desparate. They have started selling advertising on their tray tables. One flight I took this week GM had ads all over the plane (pictured above), on the flight back it was Verizon. (This was on top of the several minutes of forced advertising they subjected us to with the drop-down TV monitors, with the sound and jingles blasted over the PA.)

Luckily I discovered that they are just vinyl labels that peel off easily. That’s me stickin’ it to the man.

Gee, US Airways, think if you improved the flying experience that might help retain customers, rather than pissing them off with indentured advertude?

</grumpy> 

Jess McMullin has posted an interview he did with me a few weeks back, on his bplusd blog (a very good read all around). We touched on a lot of different topics in our 45 minute conversation, which he summarizes as:

• Chatting about the strategy practice at frog. Differences between traditional strategy offering from McKinsey or Bain. The advantages of integrating strategy with a more holistic practice including industrial and interaction designers, engineers, and others.
• Discussion of Org 2.0 companies and how they are better able to take on innovation and create compelling experience-based products, services, and systems. If you’re in an Org 1.0 company, start with a skunk works.
• Dealing with the innovation surplus. Companies that have embraced innovation now have no shortage of fantastic ideas. Now the challenge is prioritization and execution.
• Core insights. Like core competencies, core insights emerge from the unique combination of experience, skills, information, and activities of your organization. Core insights are hard to duplicate in the market, and offer significant competitive advantages.
• Some thoughts on influencing innovation - how can aspiring innovators escape the gravity well of the status quo? If you’re not in a company that embraces innovation, what can you do? Adam comes back to skunk works as one way to build momentum. Look for much more on this topic at bplusd in the coming weeks and months.

 It was a lot of fun to do, thanks to Jess for suggesting it and putting the effort into doing it. You can download the full mp3 from his site.

Creating good user experiences (UX) over and over again means creating first good employee experiences (EX - I’m trademarking that!). That’s the lesson from Southwest airlines according to an NY Times article about retiring co-founder Herbert Kelleher:

Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest’s success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”…

[W]hen you look at a company like American, with its poisonous employee relations and its glum customer base, and compare it with Southwest, with its happy employees and contented customers, you can’t help thinking that Mr. Kelleher was on to something when he put employees first. “There isn’t any customer satisfaction without employee satisfaction,” said Gordon Bethune, the former chief executive of Continental Airlines, and an old friend of Mr. Kelleher’s. “He recognized that good employee relations would affect the bottom line. He knew that having employees who wanted to do a good job would drive revenue and lower costs.”

This isn’t really surprising for a service company like Southwest, but the same rule applies, I believe, to companies that make products. Employee happiness often comes from walking the walk — in other words not just making big pronouncements about how much you love your employees (Kelleher wept when talking about his employess in his going-away speech), but in seeing those through in actions big and small. And often it’s the small ones  that show how you actually mean. It’s kind of like what they say about ethics - it’s what you do when nobody’s looking.

These small touches to how you treat employees are often the most intimate ones, and they communicate how deeply felt the relationship is (or not, as the case may be). Southwest, for example, seems to give its flight staff a great deal of autonomy when it comes to how they intereact with passengers, but bounded by some established guidelines. This has famously led to some staff singing the safety announcements and adding comedic commentary (I once heard one say “There may be fifty ways to leave your lover, but there are only four ways off this big bird!”). It also probably led to the more recent episodes of passengers getting walked off planes for risque clothing…just goes to show that what constitutes a “good” UX is different for different people.

While any company can luck out with one-off good experiences, a long term systemic philosophy of treating employees right fosters a mindset that is focused on thinking about the needs of others, which ideally translates into the products the employees create for the company’s customers.

Cable TV companies are famously indifferent to user experiences, and my provider, Comcast, recently showcased one example. They finally started allowing previews of on-demand movies, but check out how they managed to  mess up the experience:

That giant blue box stays on screen for the entire duration of the preview, obscuring a good chunk of it (even more for non-widescreen previews than what you see here). It’s really distracting.

You wouldn’t see something like this if Southwest ran a cable system.

References:

The Sinatra of Southwest Feels the Love, NY Times

Org Chart 2.0: Built for User Experience Systems

There is an interesting article in the April 2008 Harvard Business Review about how to be a successful services company, and one of the examples they talk about is Progressive Insurance. They talk about the two features of Progressive which are most distinctive and visible - their white vans, and how they list competitor’s rates alongside their own. As the article describes:

When someone insured by Progressive is involved in an auto accident, the company immediately sends out a van to assist that person and to assess the damage on the spot… Customers love this level of responsiveness and give the company high marks for service.

But customers are very price sensitive about auto insurance and so would not pay more for this service in their monthly premiums. So why does Progressive do it? Because it cuts down on fraud. Turns out most insurance fraud happens when people make claims on accidents that never happened or which were staged. This results in expensive legal costs. By dispatching a representative to the scene immediately, Progressive helps prevent this type of fraud, and even discourages it pre-emptively because people will expect a representative to show up and therefore not even attempt fraud.

 

It’s not that Progressive is determined to go one better than rivals to win the business. In fact, Progressive’s is the lowest quote only about half the time. What Progressive does believe is that is quote is the right one given the probability of that person’s getting into an accident - a probability that the insurer is best in class at determining. If indeed its quote is spot-on, then allowing a competitor to insure the customer at a lower rate is doubly effective: It frees Progressive from a money-losing propoition while burdening its competitor with the unprofitable account. Thus a level of service that looks downright altruistic to the customer actually benefits the company.

In other words, potential customers self-select not to use Progressive, but still come away feeling impressed by Progressive’s service and trustworthyness. If at some point in the future when their driving record has improved they may return to Progressive’s site and see that their price has improved, and potentially switch. So it’s a win-win for Progressive and buyers, only Progressive’s competitors lose. The perfect scenario!