It's time to get rid of hitting the guide button twice!

[saleen351]

Hate that freaking thing! I only want to hit the button ONCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's 2007 we shouldn't have to hit the button twice, it's time the R15 team polishs this box up...

[Clint Lamor]

Has nothing to do with polish it was a design choice. One push guide is being tested on the HR20 so I would hope the R15 sees it also. Bad thing is I still try to hit it twice out of habit which annoys me even worse :)

[dodge boy]

I think that after you hit guide, if you want all those options you should then hit menu, I hope they "fix" it on the standard receivers as well.

[LameLefty]

One push guide is being tested on the HR20

And we LOVE it! :D On the other hand, my kids' D11 receivers still need two pushes and the new R15 I've got coming to replace an old, dying Series 1 DirecTivo will still need two pushes. Blech - what a sad state of UI affairs . . . :(

[Clint Lamor]

Seriously I wish many of the things in the UI could be toggled as to how we want them to act. Would make many people including myself happy.

[Ed Campbell]

The 1-touch solution for the HR20 takes you 1st to Guide -- 2nd touch takes you to the menu of Guides. Same button [Guide] for both.

[jpl]

The 1-touch solution for the HR20 takes you 1st to Guide -- 2nd touch takes you to the menu of Guides. Same button [Guide] for both.

That's actually not a bad way to implement it. Sometimes I want the channel filters. But not most of the time. Most of the time, I want the full stinking guide. This little annoyance on the R15 is an indication of just bad design. Why not make the full guide come up on the first guide button push, and if I want the filters, THEN I would just hit guide again. That seems to be a much smarter interface.

[saleen351]

It proves the point they didn't test these boxes before they shipped them. It's such a dumb design.. Software people are out of touch with the real world.

[Clint Lamor]

It proves the point they didn't test these boxes before they shipped them. It's such a dumb design.. Software people are out of touch with the real world.

Thats purely your opinion. There are more then likely people out there that like it the current way. Making a design decision has absolutely nothing to do with when the box was shipped nor does your opinion make something dumb to the masses.

[JimV]

Ive never used the first menu screen. I dont see the point.

[jpl]

Thats purely your opinion. There are more then likely people out there that like it the current way. Making a design decision has absolutely nothing to do with when the box was shipped nor does your opinion make something dumb to the masses.

I have to agree with you. A nonsensical design doesn't indicate bad testing (that is, it doesn't indicate that the unit is flawed). Still doesn't make it a good design. But there are many s/w systems that seem to have been developed in isolation of what the consumer would really prefer. I think this little nit (and that's really what this issue is to me) is particularly galling to many users. Before I got my first R15, a co-worker got his. When I asked him about what he liked and didn't like about the unit, the FIRST thing he told me that he didn't like - the fact that you have to press the guide button twice.

[wbmccarty]

I suspect that Saleen has in mind usability testing rather than functional or reliability testing. Usability testing evaluates designs from the standpoint of human-computer interaction. Some here may be familiar with Jakob Nielsen's work related to usability testing of web sites.

This quirky R-15 design feature does seem to me to be unlikely to have survived usability testing. So, I suspect that Saleen is right in claiming that usability testing was not performed.

I do agree that the existence of this quirk tells us little or nothing about whether other sorts of testing were performed. But, the high number of residual defects does suggest that testing has been less than optimal, to put the conclusion gently. So, I think Saleen has a point even if he had in mind some sort of testing other than usability testing. It's hard to defend as adequate any aspect of the software process that gave us the R-15.

Cheers,

[BigPotty]

My guess is one of the software programmers put a lot of hard work into developing the Channel Categories menu, and was probably paid well for the effort. So I would assume that they wanted it to display before the "normal" guide because otherwise it would rarely get used (at least by me).

[wbmccarty]

BP, as a slight twist on your suggestion, I presume that the Categories menu was created by the project leader. That fact would, at least, explain why it was featured prominently.... :D

Cheers,

[poncho]

check out bskyb's set top box user guide:

http://www.sky.com/Assets/PDF/StaticFiles/10449603.pdf

look at page 12 and 15 - looks familiar? i thought so. let's see - rupert owns bskyb, rupert owns directv. hmmmm...:scratchin

[JimV]

Rupert doesnt own D* anymore.

EPG similarity might be because some of the same people at Sky work on the NDS EPG that D* uses for the R15's.

As for what their motivation is with a lot of the gui design, they have to account for the amount of space (memory) they have to store the guide gui and how fast it comes up on the screen among other things (like keeping content providers happy).

I wonder if the reason they put that first screen in is so that people would choose a shorter guide thereby improving performance. They might have known that the full guide was too slow so this would be a way to encourage people to shorten it.

[saleen351]

It's really a common sense issue, the avg person doesn't know what they want to watch so they scroll thru all their channels and if they are like me their guide only shows their favorites. I would also like to point out if D wanted to improve that screen when I click on sports It doesn't bring up only sports channels because the vast majority of sports are NOT ON SPORTS CHANNELS! It should bring up all sporting events.

anyways, I'll be glad when it's gone, dumb design that lacked any end user feedback.

[poncho]

Rupert doesnt own D* anymore.

EPG similarity might be because some of the same people at Sky work on the NDS EPG that D* uses for the R15's.

As for what their motivation is with a lot of the gui design, they have to account for the amount of space (memory) they have to store the guide gui and how fast it comes up on the screen among other things (like keeping content providers happy).

I wonder if the reason they put that first screen in is so that people would choose a shorter guide thereby improving performance. They might have known that the full guide was too slow so this would be a way to encourage people to shorten it.

rupert still owns d* - the deal with liberty has yet to close. and it was during his ownership that the d10, r15, h20 and hr20 were designed and launched.

anyways, the software developers are pretty much at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to deciding what goes on a set top box's gui. you've got the marketing executives, creative designers and engineering managers who gets to put in their 2 cents worth of opinions. the poor software architects and developers have to implement the gui design no matter how dumb it is.

[BigPotty]

The main guide wouldn't be so long if the Channels I Get feature worked!

[saleen351]

I hope you people use the favorites feature, if you did you'd probably only have 50 channels like I do... I still go to some people houses and they never set up the favs, so they scroll thru 328239405 PPV channels then the Halmark channel, then past HSN and the 0234854 similar channels.

[papa_azteca]

Actually the "guide filter" was implemented with the first D10 series recievers. The R15, H10, H20 and HR20 followed in order to provide customers a similar experience on the D* branded receivers.

That's my guess.

[Blitz68]

Well then it looks likethe HR20-700 will be starting a new trend to follow and I love it. :D