When I moved to Vancouver in 1993, I brought with me an old TV, and it had a ‘converter box’ to change the channels. It was connected to the television by a long cord. It had 12 buttons on it and a 3-way toggle switch to triple the amount of channels it could go to. Even for that time it was a novelty to those who came to my apartment, why didn’t I just have a remote?

Now, in my basement we have a projector for a television, and we have 5 remotes:

The projector, the speaker/amplifier, the TV channel changer, the DVD player, and the Apple TV remote.

If I project my phone onto the screen using the Apple TV, my phone becomes a 6th remote.

None of these remotes looks the same or puts the controls in a similar place. Even a control as simple as the volume is something I need to search for when I switch remotes. There is no universal design for these tools. My upstairs TV starts and says, ‘Press ‘OK’ to watch TV’ but the centre ‘OK’ button is one of the only buttons on that remote that isn’t labeled!

I find this quite frustrating.

I think this frustrates me even more than it should because I actually don’t watch a lot of TV, so every time I use them I feel that I need to relearn the locations of everything. I will routinely change the channel instead of raise the volume, or jump back a full scene when I’m trying to rewatch/re-listen to the last 10 seconds.

I’m not advocating for universal design, that likely won’t happen. But what if remotes were to come up with some universal colour patterns? The yellow buttons change channels, the green is the power button, the blue button is are for volume, etc.

By doing something like this, remotes can continue to look different, but still provide a better user experience.

Where else does a lack of universal design hinder user experience?