GUIDELINES:

“It probably won an award.” – Don Norman

This week’s exercise asks you to design an elegant but ultimately unusable universal remote control. The remote must control at least two systems (example: TV and DVR) but can be expanded to include lighting, thermostat, security systems, and more.

Imagine something that might be a candidate for a CES Innovation Award or another Industrial Design Award such as Red Dot, or that might receive a glowing review from Gizmodo or Engadget, but that would, upon closer inspection, turn out to provide a horrible user experience because it violates all of Don Norman’s recommendations for designing successful products. Specifically, it should provide:

• poor discoverability
• poor mappings
• poor conceptual model
• poor feedback

The design should be plausible. A good solution to this exercise would be a device that one could imagine being manufactured, but that would still suffer from glaring usability flaws.

Describe your design concept, accompanied by sketches if possible. Provide a brief description/marketing pitch for how your concept achieves design “excellence” (what positive qualities does it have?). Also, discuss how it falls short on all four of the criteria identified by Norman.