Switched On: Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing
posted July 13th 2005 3:39PM
You don't need to be a user-interface guru like Don Norman to understand that, when dealing with electronic equipment, the user should always be in control. Even the simplest electric appliance, the desk lamp, generally has at least a power switch or chain.
However, in the world of high-tech, the simple On/Off switch is becoming optional or obscure equipment on many devices. Take, for example, the Archos Gmini 400. This fine example of portable multimedia is generally fun to use. This is fortunate since, without a little coaching, chances are you'd be hard-pressed to figure out how to turn it off. The secret lies in holding down the "Escape" button for a few seconds. This may be conceptually sensible, but this button has a circular arrow symbol reminiscent of the "Back" button on a Web browser. That's a bit of a leap for someone who hasn't at least glanced at the documentation.
Notebook computers are other devices for which activation and deactivation would seem laughably complex to consumers 20 years ago � sleep modes, status lights, hibernation, resume sequences. These are classic symptoms of companies stuck in the rut of kludging around technological limitations such as boot-up times. Have you ever accidentally turned off your notebook trying to get it out of standby mode? Intel and to a lesser extent Microsoft have been talking about �instant on� PCs for at least five years, but they�re still not here.
This is becoming a bigger issue as PCs try to masquerade as audiovisual components in the living room. It�s also been a challenge for car computer hobbyists who are drawn to operating systems such as DOS because it doesn�t mind having its juice snatched away from it like a grade school kid being bullied in a cafeteria .
Cable set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta may be guilty of the most bizarre power button behavior for its digital video recorder distributed by TimeWarner Cable. Turning the unit off will stop television signals from being displayed on your TV, but it won�t stop recordings. In other words, the �off� button really isn�t. Like the wall telephone in the old Saturday Night Live skit in which Dan Aykroyd impersonated a bleeding Julia Child, it�s a prop.
Scientific-Atlanta probably designed this as a safety feature to ensure that the shows you want recorded stay recorded. But this is a DVR, not a heart-lung machine. What if, for example, you discover that some second-tier cable channel is starting one of those infamous �marathons� of a show you haven�t yet designated to record for first-runs or that you�ll be leaving for a week and have a library of stuff on your DVR you don�t want disturbed? The need to foray into the spaghetti factory behind your television is especially unfortunate because, when the box occasionally flakes out, one of the first things customer support will tell you to do is to reset it by unplugging it and plugging it again. What�s next? Making us mangle wire hangers to activate blindly some tiny reset hole in the back?
If companies want to offer �always on� devices, they must live up to staying always on. For other electronic products with more transient use to approach the elegance of appliances, they have to be turned on and off simply.
Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis at NPD Techworld, a division of market research and analysis provider The NPD Group. Views expressed in Switched On, however, are his own. Feedback is welcome at fliptheswitch@gmail.com.
My brother called me after borrowing a friend's ipod asking me, "how the hell do I turn this thing off?"
Welcome to the future.
I've accidentally turned a computer off while trying to get it out of standby a few times. :(
My epson p2000 you have to hold a slider down for a few seconds for it to turn off. You pull the slider down to turn it back on. Bad design if you ask me. THe first notably bad offender I can remember of this obscure off/on stuff was the PS2. the "power button" (denoted by the symbol on the button) turns the system "off" but to really turn it off you hvae to flip the switch in the back. What gives? Anyone not familiar with a ps2 would go for the power button and get no results. Bad Sony.
Apple and their ipod(which I have and love) are also offenders of sketchy on/off design. Anyone w/o previous knowledge of a similar system would have no basis to believe holding play for 5 seconds will power down a system. I'm sure I'll be back with more later tonight.
This thread will be fun :)
most dvr's do this. i push 'off' on my replaytv and tivo and it basically just cuts off the video out feed.
Ever heard of a manual?
" sleep modes, status lights, hibernation, resume sequences. "
^ Whats wrong with that? I dont want to turn off my laptop, say I just wanna make a coffee? Why waste 5-10 minutes worth of battery time? Put it to sleep, get your stuff and come back. Apple powerbooks make it pathetically easy, just close the lid to go to sleep, and open it back up to take it out of sleep.
What about the PSP? Everyone I hand it to ends up turning it off instead of bringing it out of standby. Flick the switch dealy up but don't hold it? By the time "don't hold it" leaves my mouth, it's already powered itself down. I think devices should just come with an off switch that does nothing but shock them. Don't turn off electronics. It's not their style. They wear out faster with constant shutdowns and startups. I don't understand the logic of people who want to turn stuff off.
On another note:
"Like the wall telephone in the old Saturday Night Live skit in which Dan Aykroyd impersonated a bleeding Julia Child, its a prop."
I think that's the worst sentence I've ever read in my life. Why would you stretch so far for a simile?
Re:4
Yea we have heard of a manual. The idea behind good design is that the larger the manual has to be to explain how to use the device, the worse/unintuitive the design of said device is.
In theory everything can be just a nice pad of buttons with numbers and possibly a small joystick and as long as they give you a good manual that explains what each number does you should have nothing to complain about right?
*Note: There was some sarcasm. :)
otakucode:
I never knew you could turn the psp off. I was just fine and dandy with assuming it always went into sleep mode(which I loved) and you had to click the home button to switch games...
Crazy world we live in :)
The iPod also shuts itself off when it's not being used, so it isn't exactly urgent to know how to shut it off. However, my iPod mini manual is quite short, and pretty easy to skim, so I can't say that has led to a bulky set of instructions.
I agree with #4. What a lazy society we have here. RTFM if you are don't understand how to power on/off your device.
is this serious? i agree some devices (primarily computers) can take too many steps to turn off, but that circle symbol is the same power button icon on every piece of computer equipment i own. pocket pc's and cellphones have had it too. i've never heard of anyone comparing it to a back button icon.
This article was a real turn-on! I was recently stymied by trying to turn off the Sidekick, myself. I like to think of myself as a halfway competent techie, but have been flummoxed by bad UI on consumer electronics more times that I can count (because I can't figure out how to turn my calculator back on). Much better than Andy Rooney -- keep the columns coming!
For the DVR recording when it's off, isn't that a feature copied from the VCR? Which makes sense, cause that's what we expect it to be like. Too me, the most annoying "always-on" device is the cable modem. Not only do you have to unplug it to turn it off, but you have to leave it unplugged for 30 seconds or more to really reset it. Which would be fine if it didn't require this kind of attention so often.
My TV is like that. The on/off button locks in the on position, and you then turn it on and off by the remote. If you unlock the button into the off position you can't turn it on with the remote. Now what kind of sense does that make?
Basically this whole article can be summed up in one sentence:
The power button has been replaced by standby, and that's just stupid.
And #6, while most electronics are better suited to being on all the time, certain devices, such as TVs are not, especially when you live in the lightning capital of the world.
"RTFM if you are don't understand how to power on/off your device."
I guess you don't realize how ridiculous that sounds. It actually made me laugh out loud. (I'm easily amused.)
There is no device in the world that should be so complex that it requires you to READ A MANUAL in order to figure out how to TURN IT OFF. Turning a device off is a matter of a single button press, or at least it should be, and that button uses a universal icon, or at least it's supposed to (it's the one pictured above).
Even incredibly complex devices like cars are intuitive enough that most people do not need to read a manual to figure out how to turn one OFF. For the most part, this is because turning the thing ON is equally intuitive (i.e. here is a key, here is a keyhole, now what do you do?) and turning it off is simply the reverse.
The devices being described here do not work that way. Some of them *may* actually turn on pretty intuitively - the iPod, for example, turns on when you press "play". But to turn it off, you don't just press play again, you press play and *hold* it, or you just pause it and leave it and it turns itself off. This is not the worst way Apple could have handled things but it is not the best either. It is not intuitive or obvious. A simple on/off switch would have solved things nicely.
Working the on/off system on a single non-intuitive device is not a big deal. But it becomes an annoyance when you've got a lifestyle full of electronic gadgets that all handle this simple little operation in a completely different manner. There's only so much random crap that people want to have to remember how to do every day, and learning and remembering how to turn off their music player/cell phone/PC/sidekick/PSP/whatever just should not be necessary.
(This is also ignoring the fact that soft-off systems often don't even work. My iPod, for example, no longer turns itself off if I don't touch it for a while. It'll sit there, paused, until its battery runs out. Conversely, if I turn it off using the play and hold method, it requires a reset to turn back on. This is the one big beef I have with my iPod.)
On the other hand, I will say that some laptop manufacturers do seem to get it right. My HP laptop has a simple, big button right in the middle of the top of bezel around the keyboard with the power icon on it and it defaults to hibernate. This is, IMO, as it should be. It's still a soft-power button but that's actually necessary for a PC if you want to use something like remote wake-up - the alternative would be to have both soft *and* hard power buttons, which would be even more confusing on a laptop (desktops do usally have a soft button and a hard switch in back). Anyway, hibernation *is* turning the PC off as much as any soft button turns anything off, but with a fairly fast start-up time.
I do have a beef with the article author's comments about his TWC DVR, though. I have the same DVR, and I had a TiVo before that. I cannot for the life of me understand anyone who actually wants a real hard "off" state for his DVR. On the other hand, when you press the power button it does, for all intents and purposes, turn the box off as far as the consumer is concerned. (It's as "off" as any other electronic device that doesn't have a hard electricity cutoff, which few do these days even if they have an intuitive and normal power button.) And it saves power, which is the main point of shutting it off, because all it's doing is a raw data dump to the hard drive when a recording is scheduled. But the actual act of turning the thing on and off works exactly the way any consumer should expect it to, and no consumer's going to complain that he *didn't* miss his recordings because the box kept recording them when off.
Generally, though, I agree with the main points of the article.
@14: I completely agree. I don't know why anyone would want their DVR to completely turn off. Although, I would like to have been told by brighthouse (time warner to some of you) that my stuff would still record with it "off". I was pretty sure it would, but I had to test it.
My PowerBook has a great philosophy on the on/off issue. Turn it on? Press the button with the symbol on it. Soft Off? Press the button again...a menu pops up asking you whether you'd like to turn it off sleep or whatever and if you're in trouble hold the button and it turns completely off cutting the power. Good interface design.
I've turned my SMT5600 off more times than I'd like to count because I'll hold it with my left index finger wrapped around the top while playing a game with my right and blam - it's off. Combined with a 30 second boot time (give or take), it's quite an annoyance.
To: #4 Hey Bjarke, where is your off button?
Why would you turn off your iPod? I don't understand. Just push "pause" and stick it in your pocket.
the worst would be with the vcr. in order to turn it off but allow a recording with the timer you had to like push two buttons on the remote at once. yea that's user-friendly.
i'm pretty sure a SA tivo only allows you to turn it 'off' via somewhere in the menu.
they'll put an eject button on a remote for a dvd player, real handy, but no power or timer button?
the setting on my tv to lock-out the power button on the set is the greatest invention ever... especially if you have a 1 to 2 year old in the house.
Hmmm . . . . #14 - Turning a key back when cars were invented was JUST AS BIG OF A PROBLEM as the on/off swithch is today - electronics today are like cars yesterday(metaphorically speaking.)
"Give me convenience or give me death" - Patrick Henry's great-great-great-grandson.
Two subtle but dangerous trends seem to be at work here: First, that we are leaving things "on" when our energy resources are diminishing faster than Janet Jackson's wardrobe. Second, companies like Microsoft and Time-Warner are keeping us "on" because they would like us to become dependent on their services.
The little black boxes that power more and more of our life's gadgets are never completely off and are beginning to add up to a measurable portion of our energy usage. It's true that we'll have to retire a whole lot of Escalades before the net impact of today's power cubes becomes significant, but our "instant on" society has gotten a little out of hand. I heard a story about a guy who leaves his air conditioned office for lunch and sits in his air conditioned car in the parking lot listening to sports radio to get some "quality time" away from work. If the whole world did that (actually if the whole world drove hybrids) gas would be $10 a gallon and rising...for the last 20 years there was petroleum.
On the second issue, I was recently relegated to dial up for about 9 months (you can send condolences to me at robinm@rochester.rr.com) and I was amazed at how at times the computer seemed to be dead on the 'net. I finally realized that the speed degradation was Microsoft downloading "updates" to IE to protect me from the bugs that it attracts by being such an glutonous company.
Yeah, I love gadgets, but I REALLY love the off switch.
#5 Oooh! Your Powerbook goes to sleep when you close it. That's so great. Only Apple would make it so easy. Wow so awesome!
In case you didn't know PCs can be set to do the same thing or be set to go into hibernation or just stay on running a program if that's what the user desires.
Everything is set to the users desire. If he wants it off, its gonna be off. [But] If he wants it on standby/hibernation/sleep well by gosh let him. As the Ipod is most of the time never "Off" usually its just on sleep whenever its not being used (Quoted from a few good sources). A manual always helps tons, just depends usually turning it off i wouldn't want to look for that easily thinking there HAS to be a way cuz who wants to search for it, unless your too lazy to look in the index for Power/Turning On/Off.
i think most fairly recent Dell computers (including mine, which is a dell dimension 4500 i bought in 2002), have pretty good "power button" design)
when i press my power button, i also get a message that pops up and asks me what i would like to do.
when i hold it down for 3 seconds, the computer will do a warm re-boot.
when i hold it down for more than 5 seconds, the computer immediately cuts off power.
pretty intuitive to me.
@26: That's alright, but what happens if you hold it for 4 seconds :)
I do tech support for neighborhood and school computers. If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me how to "just turn it off 'cause the power button doesn't do anything" I'd be rich right now. For people who use this kind of equipment everyday, it may be intuitive to hold a button down. For most of the population, it's the oddest thing they've ever seen.
I thought that symbol was rather standard for on/off now days. The 0 and the 1 became one ( no pun intended).
I think all electronic devices should have some sort of on/off switch (not a button). That way you can look at the switch and KNOW what mode it is in. You can always reboot it, without having to unplug anything. First computers had buttons that used plastic linkages to flip power supply switches back and forth. Then the electronic on/off button that rarely worked came. Then, the good computers came with a toggle switch in the back so you could cut power to the power supply instead of unplugging. Wonderful; how long will it take before the toggle switch comes BACK to the FRONT?
Perhaps Apples making the iPod difficult to turn off was one of their design ideas. If you can not remove the battery and replace it yourself, then those few extra minutes that people leave their iPod on for will help end the battery's life that much sooner and Apple can profit more quickly when charging people to replace their batteries. Perhaps I'm stretching here, but do you really design a device with a rechargeable battery that is not easily removed by accident?
And of course, manuals. I can understand Linux users liking manuals; they need to RTFM on a regular basis to earn their status. Designing an intuitive human-machine interface is an engineering challenge. People aren't necessarily lazy because they don't read the manual- they shouldn't have to read the manual to turn off their device.
My cell phone manual disappointed me. 4 languages, plenty of pages, and then somewhere in the middle of the English section I find the sentence "some features are not documented in this manual." SOME? How about almost all of the features that I couldn't figure out on my own. Sigh. We all need to get used to our new stuff.
One last word comment on on/off buttons
I've owned several "Homes" space heaters. I wish they still had the older analog speed control and second knob to select power level. Sometime after the model was designed, some genius at Homes decided that "One-Touch" would sound good in advertising (or something). The "One-Touch" Homes has (in case you haven't figured it out yet) ONE button. Off -> last state -> next temperature -> ... -> max temperature -> off -> on -> lowest temperature -> ... Great. You can always hold the button down for two seconds to turn off, or take advantage of the state machine and hold the button down for two seconds twice in a row in order to go down a temperature setting without having to loop through all the temperatures.
The digital lights and temperature numbers under the lights made me think the new design would be great when I first saw it, but after using a few times I realized how nice it is nice to be able to QUICKLY turn off a device instead of being at its will, having to wait 2 seconds. I know it's only two seconds; when you're trying to push it with your foot, it can easily turn into 30 seconds and a foot cramp. And then theres the temperature setting what if you overshoot? "Overshooting" should not be a concern when setting a space heater temperature! It just shouldn't!
Sigh. I never thought I'd have a chance to vent that in public.
good article.
I have Comcast dvr box and if i turn it off while recording, I get the "this action will cancel your recording" option. poor interface.
as far as electronic appliances go, I have to say the PS2 is the worst offender of all.
In a world where all my entertainment compoents fit into my a/v rack or amrmoire, they all can be powered on by a button on the front of the console.
PS2 on the other hand, forces me to reach all the way around and fumble to turn the GD thing on.
I hope to christ Sony engineers fix this. how hard is it to move a power supply button to the front of the console? I mean, they already have the two status lights on the front.
F for sony.
Sony's always been schitzo when it comes to power switches. I guess people whined that they couldn't turn the damned things "off" properly so Sony added a Hard power switch to their devices. Even my DVD player is like this. Hit the power button and the thing shuts off completely - even if the tray is still out!
I never bother with the physical switch - I just use the remote and put the thing in standby.
The flipside is our craptastic HP computers at work - they have NO powerswitch, just a button that gives the Windows shutdown command. What do we do when the computer freezes? Pull the plug from the wall socket. Seriously.
well, im impacient guy, i dont like to wait for my devices to turn on, so i like to leave them "on" or in "sleep" mode.
The problem is that all the devices that i have consume so much power(even on standby they consume they "suck some juice") , so the energy bill just goes up.
When i buy a device i usually like to buy the ones that have a toogle switch that allows me to "kill it", and for the rest of it i just connect them to an extension that has a switch and "kill" them when not in use.
if the energy sources where infinite i wouldnt care and would leave everything always on but there is no infinite source so i dont leave them on or in stanby.
i have loads of trouble turning off my gf's ipod, (and so does she), sometimes it just won't turn off so a lot of the time it just gets left on
As for the SA Set Top Box, that is standard practice for ALL Set Top Boxes (including the other biggie: Motorola). This is regardless of DVR capabilities and is for the technical reasons that they have to stay on to download the guide information and respond to other commands from the head end.
{28. Posted Jul 14, 2005, 12:18 AM ET by Joe Clay
@26: That's alright, but what happens if you hold it for 4 seconds :)}
if i hold it down for exactly 4.3141592654 seconds, goes in to "stealth" mode...in which it is secretly programmed to transfer 100 million dollars from donald trump into my personal bank account.
unfortunately, since the "point" 3141592654 seconds follow the value of "pi" exactly, which is an infinite value, i have been CLOSE, but unable to complete this process :(
#36: haha...I can help you by adding a few more digits..get you a little closer
4.314159265359 seconds....a little bit closer....maybe if you fade out pressing the button like a calc limit?
I can't be sure, but perhaps some thought actually went into the location of the PS2 power switch. How many people have had nervous breakdowns after accidentally kicking the power/reset button on a game console?
Perhaps this idea is behind the concept of requiring switches to be held up to turn them off even when in hibernation mode.
The iPod? You certainly don't want to turn it off by accident when it is in your pocket. The common Hollywood nuclear missile launch switch (with the plastic cover that you need to flip up before you can press it) would require too much space.
I guess my point is that these off buttons may actually save frustration after people learn how to use them. Granted, reaching around to the back of a game console to turn it on doesn't sound desierable when it is in any sort of entertainment center, but unless if all the controllers are wireless now don't kids still sit on the floor 5 feet from the TV when playing with these things?
I'm all for power management, and totally against users reading the manual. I made $125 last week checking out a Latitude laptop that mysteriously switched itself off when left alone for 15 minutes or more. The customer had convinced the support staff that his motherboard was probably at fault and might need to be replaced. Lo and behold, under Power Management in the control panel it was set to switch the display and the HDD off at, you guessed it, 15 minutes. Will wonders never cease?
@ post 11 - The picture in the article isn't the power button on the Archos. The best picture I can find of the button is here http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041021/images/gmini400-jeu2.jpg
It's the button directly below the D-pad