The on-screen guide for my
Direct TV box looks roughly like this:
The control on my remote that causes the current channel to move up and down looks like this:
If the problem here is obvious to you, you too may have a future in user interface design. If you thought to yourself,
"hey, they screwed up an obvious natural mapping," then you are probably already involved on some level.
Just to make it perfectly clear what I am talking about, the orientation of the controls are out of whack. From my perspective, the channels increase going down on the screen but going up on the remote. The fact that the two don't match causes me to change the channel up when I meant to change it down, and vice versa, pretty much constantly.
You might call me a moron, and most days you might be right, but not here. This design is broken. It should do what I want without requiring me to stop to think about it.
It's amazing that decades after the publication of
The Design of Everyday Things that it is still possible for a well-funded company to make this mistake. This company has enough money to
buy the NFL through 2010, but apparently it isn't able to find a decent interface designer.