If you own a home electronic device, you’ve likely used a remote control to operate it. If you own more than one device, there is a very high chance you’ve used two very different kind of remote controls to operate each device — and here lies an issue. Remote controls are all very different, and it can be a nightmare to understand them.

What is the problem?

Switch the channel to HDMI so you can play a game, and you’ll likely be looking in a different area depending on which brand and model TV you purchased, and which variant of remote control it came with. There is very little consistency within the consumer electronics industry, and it’s incredibly evident with this particular device.

LG’s LN5400 remote

In our house we have two Playstation 4 controllers, and one remote for our LG TV, on which we only regularly use four of the forty-six buttons: 1) on/off 2) input 3) volume 4) channel. Thats less than 10% of the buttons! This is a huge waste of real estate, and a lot of pressure on the cognitive load of a person using it.

You could argue that I’ll need a lot of those other buttons for setting up the TV initially — and you would be right, but these sort of one time tasks could easily be carried out by using buttons placed on the back of the unit, leaving the remote control to be a usable for the rest of the devices lifetime.

I found some interesting images online of TV remotes depicted by various people, and they all had one thing in common. Complexity reduction