Side Story

PVR Report

In Jan of 2004, Geoff and I attended CES for the first time. This was just before CES would became the over covered over hyped It conference so we didn’t really know what to expect. Every year at CES there is an emergent theme that defines the show. There is always one dominant technology trend that all the CE manufacturers are placing a bet on. In 2004 that theme was DVRs. Most of the CE industry had been caught off guard by TIVO’s sudden emergence in 2000 as the must have gadget of the time.

By 2004 every company had some sort of DVR/media centre at CES. If there is one thing CES is really good for, it is seeing everyone’s products in one room. You can easily identify trends and disparities in products just walking the show floor. The one thing Geoff and I instantly commented on, was how bad the UIs for these products were. Not just bad, but awful.

Prior to CES Geoff and I had often commented on bad the UIs on our own PVRs were. It was disheartening to see the upcoming models did nothing to improve the user experience of these devices.

When we started Teehan + Lax we had a vision that we would never just do browser based UI/UX design. We understood, even in 2002, that browser based interactions would decrease over time as new devices entered into our life. At CES we saw a huge gap in the user experience being delivered by DVRs and felt we had thoughts on how we could improve it.

But how do you get someone to hire you to redesign a DVR interface? We had no idea.

At the time, we offered an expert review service to clients where we reviewed their UX using a defined set of criteria and then suggested some recommendations on how to improve. We decided to offer some unsolicited advice to the CE industry.

At the time, the only DVRs we could get our hands on were the ones offered in Toronto. Rogers Cable, which at the time I was a subscriber, carried a Scientific Atlanta 8000 and Geoff had a satellite dish on the now defunct Bell ExpressVu which used a rebadged Dish Network DVR.

We went to the store and bought these as any customer would brought them home and reviewed the experience of using these devices. We wrote a 21 page report documenting down the experience and commenting on their strengths and weaknesses.

It is natural for designers, when they see things they perceive as broken, to want to fix them. We’ve all experienced seeing type that was improperly kerned or misaligned graphics. Your brain instantly knows how to fix it, but you can’t. It is an itch you can’t scratch.

Our experience reviewing these PVRs elicited this response. We ached to fix the UX of these devices. We began to write all our ideas but they weren’t adequately conveying the ideas we had in our heads. Geoff quickly began mocking up screens, to demonstrate, visually, the ideas we had. That was when things got out of control.

One screen led to another, which led to another. At one point it became clear that the input device, the remote control, was half of the problem. Geoff had some experience with 3D, began painstakingly modelling the remote “we” wanted. 2 designers, Hubert Lai and Jeremy Bell worked on screens. When we looked up, our little expert review which started as a blog post, then turned into a PDF had swelled into a 41 page report. It took over 2 months of work.

We put the the PDF on our site and went back to work. A few days later, Gizmodo picked it up and things went crazy. The PDF started getting downloaded tens of thousands of times. The fantasy remote that Geoff mocked up, became an object of technolust for many people. The UI we proposed was quickly copied by open source projects for media centre skins (namely for SageTV).

For us, it became the first thing we really got known for. Even to this day, many designers associate us with “the PVR” report. The report is part of the curriculum of an MIT course on product design. We even got a few calls from cable companies and CE manufacturers to discuss maybe working together (nothing ever happened). It would be many years later that the UI and UX of these devices would improve. Looking back, UX innovation for the 10ft interface has come from companies like XBMC, Plex and Boxee rather than the CE industry. Those innovations have trickled down to CE manufacturers but it is still an area for massive improvement... call us.

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