Katie Hafner's New York Times article on designing the TiVO remote is a must-read, as it offers a nice window into the kinds of challenges technology companies will need to meet in the future.
[T]he remote has become the centerpiece of home entertainment: so many functions have been relegated to this slip of an object that if it is lost, you may find yourself unable to do so much as call up a menu for watching the movie you popped into the DVD player.But if the remote control is a linchpin, it is also often an inscrutable one.... The device can feel like an afterthought, thrown together without any planning at all.
Increasingly, however, electronics companies are recognizing that building an easy-to-use remote control is an important and challenging task.
The TiVO remote-- a peanut-shaped device with about 30 buttons on it-- is full of interesting, subtle design decisions: for example, the buttons were made of a hard rubber, and the designers put no small effort into making "the feel of hitting the buttons [similar[ to that of playing a piano." (Button behavior is an often-overlooked but critical aspect of device design: the Apple mouse's designers worried about it a lot, too.)
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