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> Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids. They require using complicated remotes or mobile phones, and navigating apps that continually try to lure you into

• bananaowl 9mo ago
  I witnessed my great aunt of 85 trying to watch TV. It was sad and painful. How ux is forgetting this entire generation is just terrible.
  • the_snooze 9mo ago
    UX is designed for shareholders first, not end-users.
    • bluGill 9mo ago
      In the long run shareholders care about customers though, not the UI. Of course in the short term the stock market has always been about something other than fundamentals, but in the long run shareholders who care about customers tend to do better and most shareholders are in it for the long run - but they never are enough to be powerful today.
  • RicoElectrico 9mo ago
    With my grandpa thankfully it wasn't as bad, though I had to regularly change back the source to HDMI (from STB). Somehow changing that himself was too much, even though he regularly read the teletext. Later, when choosing a new TV I opted for one that accepted a CAM module, obsoleting the cable STB. The simplicity of the remote was also a factor. So a cheap 32" Samsung TV it was. Turned out great. The other choice was a Sony, but my gut feeling about UI was right all along.
  • aquova 9mo ago
    To be fair, I remember visiting my aunt's house in the mid-2000s, who had a surround sound set up her husband had set up. It required three or four remotes to work and no one but him could ever get it working. I think UX has forgotten a few generations by now.
    • lou1306 9mo ago
      But that was the niche, "elite" experience. Today, a "smart TV" is the norm.
    • mrighele 9mo ago
      Has anybody ever been able to program a VCR ?
      • c22 9mo ago
        Although the trope is hilarious I think most people just don't bother since it doesn't matter to them. I never had a problem setting the time on my VCR and using it to automatically record shows while I was at work.
        • SoftTalker 9mo ago
          Yes it was no more difficult than setting any other digital clock. Even today, my microwave, kitchen radio, and several other devices all read "12:00" because I just don't bother to reset them every time there is a power glitch.
          • Tanoc 9mo ago
            It seems strange now how often the power goes out. I remember back in the '90s I could leave my PlayStation running for two weeks because I didn't have a memory card to save my progress in Syphon Filter or NASCAR Thunder '98. Nowadays I have to set up autosave on everything and make checkpoint safeguards or scheduled backups because the power flickers off and back on at least once a week. This, with much more power efficient devices than that old PlayStation and Panasonic CRT.
  • cheschire 9mo ago
    When my grandmother was in her late 70's, she couldn't figure out the concept of menus on DVDs, so she stuck with VHS well beyond the point others had let it go. The capabilities of individuals over 70 are hugely varied. Some folks are clear-minded until 100, others start to lose their mental faculties much, much earlier. I don't think the generation is forgotten, just so vastly different in needs from the core audience that it would require an entirely different solution, and likely an entirely different company model.
    • nar001 9mo ago
      I do wonder how much of that is just convenience, a lot of people just don't want to bother, even if they would figure it out if they tried - they just don't. Your grandmother probably could've figured it out, but tapes were just much more convenient even if you had to rewind them (Obviously there's a learning curve, though)
      • SoftTalker 9mo ago
        Yeah I preferred tapes myself rather than deal with the stupid criminal warnings, unskipable content, and often bizarre menu organization on DVDs. Tapes are simple. One other thing a lot of older people learn is that if they don't want to deal with something they can feign helplessness and someone else will jump in and do it for them.
      • cheschire 9mo ago
        I'm sure you didn't intend to be arrogant and dismissive of my efforts to try to keep her current as time went on.
      • greenavocado 9mo ago
        I clearly remember my grandfather telling me how much it physically hurt to learn a few years before his death. He was highly motivated and figured out a lot on his Android tablet but could only really try to learn for a few minutes every few hours.
        • 9mo ago
  • commandlinefan 9mo ago
    My father, before he passed away from Alzheimer's, couldn't do anything _except_ watch TV and I was so infuriated by how impossibly unusable they were for him. In the end, we just bought a DVD player and a mountain of physical DVD's (on the plus side, used ones are really easy to find cheap nowadays). I can't believe there's no option to just channel up and channel down a damned TV any more.
  • robinsonb5 9mo ago
    This, 100%. I've seen the same scenario - someone with limited vision, next to no feeling in his fingertips and an inability to build a mental model of the menu system on the TV (or actually the digi-box, since this was immediately after the digital TV switchover). Losing the simplicity of channel-up / down buttons was quite simply the end of his unsupervised access to television.
    • SoftTalker 9mo ago
      Channel up/down doesn't scale to the amount of content available now. It was OK when there were maybe half a dozen broadcast stations you could choose from.
      • mook 9mo ago
        That's only if you want to watch specific things; some people just turn it on for entertainment, and change channels to have a spin at the roulette wheel for something better.
      • pessimizer 9mo ago
        This is ahistorical. If you had cable, you had 100+ channels, and there was no difficulty in numbering them and navigating them through the channel up/down buttons. There weren't even only half a dozen broadcast stations in any city in the US at least since the 50s - you at least had ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS in VHF, and any number of local and small stations in UHF. The thing that didn't scale was the new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, and invasive OS smart features after that. Before these, you could check what was on 50 channels within 10 seconds; basically as fast as you could tap the + or - button and recognize whether something was worth watching; changing channels was mainly bound by the speed of human cognition. I think young people must be astounded when they watch movies or old TV shows where people flip through the channels at that speed habitually.
        • pwg 9mo ago
          > new (weird, not sure why) latency in tuning in a channel after the DTV transition, Because with analog signals the tuner just had to tune to the correct frequency and at the next vertical blank sync pulse on the video signal the display could begin drawing the picture. With digital, the tuner has to tune to the correct frequency, then the digital decoder has to sync with the transport stream (fairly quick as TS packets are fairly small) then it has to start watching for a key frame (because without a keyframe the decoded images would appear to be static) and depending upon the compression settings from the transmitter, keyframes might only be transmitted every few seconds, so there's a multi-second wait for the next keyframe to arrive, then the display can start drawing the pictures.
  • c22 9mo ago
    When I was a kid I remember being amazed that my elderly grandmother couldn't operate the VCR. Among other things she was unfamiliar with the universal icons for 'play', 'pause', and 'stop'.
    • 72deluxe 9mo ago
      It is odd because those symbols have been used for decades even on tape players. I found it amusing the other year when a youngster knew what the save button was, and recognised it, but didn't know what it was - a floppy disk (as he'd never seen one).
  • rconti 9mo ago
    Honestly, I think this is a selling point for cable subscriptions. I find those boxes kind of painful to use, but still, it's a full-featured, consistent UI and (with HDMI-CEC) you can control everything with one remote.
  • mock-possum 9mo ago
    It’s also true vice versa - an entire generation tends to forget UX. That is to say, most people don’t want to keep learning new things, they don’t want to continue to engage with novel technology they are unfamiliar with, they “just want it to work” because “the old thing was working just fine.” They claim not to see the value in the new thing, while falling farther and farther behind the curve as they fixate on the old thing.
• tantalor 9mo ago
  My biggest gripe is how terribly slow it is to navigate UI on a TV. The latency between user input and the UI responding can be upwards of 10-20 seconds. Just incredibly user hostile.
  • andrewblossom 9mo ago
    This can be solved by using any number of 3rd-party streaming devices: Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, NVIDIA Shield, ... I've never experienced an TV OS that was reliably better than one of the above, though a Roku-OS TV came close.
    • arrozconcosas 9mo ago
      I tried to look for a 'dumb' tv for a long time to get to a setup like this. The ultimate setup would be 1) a totally dumb and stupid tv + 2) a streaming box like Apple TV or whatever. I just want the audio/visual aspect of the screen, nothing else.
      • walthamstow 9mo ago
        If you never connect it to the internet, all TVs are dumb. I have an airgapped Panasonic powered by Nvidia Shield for years. The only issue I ever had was Google adding ads to the front page of the Android TV launcher. Easily fixed by using a different launcher.
      • wafflemaker 9mo ago
        Given enough determination, you can learn how to locate antennas in the TV and remove them, which would render the TV dumb for all intents and purposes. I have no experience with it, it just might be less work to remove antennas from any TV than finding a dumb TV in 2026.
        • mikestew 9mo ago
          Or one could just, you know, not connect it to the Internet rather than ripping apart your new TV.
• zafka 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things This book - or its later editions, should be required reading for ALL engineers and designers. Actually for their managers as well.
  • eimrine 9mo ago
    They read it but vice versa.
    • jahller 9mo ago
      they read it, understood it and then applied every way possible to game our attention span
  • SoftTalker 9mo ago
    The current way is quite intentional. It wasn't done because the designers didn't know about design.
  • criddell 9mo ago
    Donald Norman can design a great tea pot, but can he design a great tea pot with recurring revenue possibilities?
• qwertox 9mo ago
  > I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;) Plus kids have a special motivation, much more urgent, in getting to know how to work that little plastic box full of buttons.
• mrweasel 9mo ago
  It's not just the TV, it's the weird take that tuners are bad, apparently. I helped my mother-in-laws friend, a lady in her 60s, getting her TV working after a move. The local cable providers don't care to offer their coax solution anymore, you need their box. To be fair, the box is nice enough, but it's way more complicated than simply hooking up the tuner. Modern Samsung TV are also awful, there's no longer a source button on the remote, so you have to use their terrible UI to navigate to the bottom of the screen, guess which input you want, which takes 10 - 15 seconds. If you can find it in their horribly busy UI.
  • pwg 9mo ago
    > you need their box. This is because every channel on the cable is encrypted now, lest someone try to pirate service, and given that the cable companies all but killed "CableCard" that box is required because it is the "decryptor" of the streams.
    • ale42 9mo ago
      I'm mostly thinking that the awful box is required because then your TV provider can sell data about what you watch.
  • tzs 9mo ago
    From what I've read on some modern Samsung TVs if they have a settings button on the remote long pressing that is a shortcut directly to the input selection. Another option is if the remote has a mic button you can use that. This works pretty well on my several year old Samsung (most of the time [1]). I just press the button and say e.g., "HDMI 2". If I want to watch an OTA channel, say channel 4, I say "channel 4". I don't know how well this works on the newest models because I believe they know have they own Alexa-like thing called Bixby handling this instead of something built specifically for TV voice control. If you don't watch OTA TV another possibility is to enable HDMI-CEC for your devices. Then when you turn on or wake a device it can switch the TV input to that device (and turn the TV on if it is not on). [1] Around a year ago they had a glitch that affected the voice commands on older TVs around the world. Most reports were for 2017 TV models. These TVs started only recognizing voice commands in Russian (and the feedback showing what you said was in Russian too). For switching between HDMI 1 and HDMI 2 I was able to learn how to say those well enough in Russian for it to work by listening to Google Translate speak them in Russian. But no matter how many times I tried I was not able to learn how to say "channel 4" well enough in Russian. It worked if I let the TV listen to Google Translate speaking it, so the problem was my pronunciation rather than Google Translate not translating correctly.
• jjkaczor 9mo ago
  Especially seniors...
• bawolff 9mo ago
  Oddly enough, i think one of the main benefits of piracy is you have to be intentional about what to watch. You pick something and go find it. You aren't prodded into mindlessly watching whatever is suggested to you. It helps break the "addiction" loop.
• microtherion 9mo ago
  I get to visit my 90-year-old mother in law a few times a week to get her TV setup (Cable box running Android TV, connected to a TV running Android TV — FML) working again. To make matters worse, the cable box remote works via Bluetooth, the TV remote over IR, so getting any universal remote that works with both AND is simple seems a difficult prospect. What are people even doing for universal remotes these days? Our household is equipped with Logitech Harmony remotes, which are no longer being made, and I dread the day they stop working.
  • kdinn 9mo ago
    When Logitech announced they were stopping making them, I bought 3 new Logitech Harmony remotes. I'm on my last one! I don't know what I am going to do after that one dies :-(
• golem14 9mo ago
  I argue that most kids are far better at using complicated remotes and mobile phones / apps than most adults. This has been true for a long time. Programming VCRs was a dark art reserved only for teens in the 80s, and I have no doubt the Romans had similar issues :)
  • goku12 9mo ago
    This kid is only 3. I doubt that he is old enough to navigate the complex on-screen menus, while taking the delays and other puzzling behaviors into account. This is not to say that young kids are stupid. But the modern device interfaces often feel like a pile of random hacks, rather than something based on the sane and well established design principles that were formulated on the basis of experience and human psychology.
    • golem14 9mo ago
      True dat, but 3 year olds turn into 10 year olds over a long weekend. (same mechanism as windchill)
• lostlogin 9mo ago
  > I'd argue that's not too different for grown-ups. ;) The ‘tv remote as a cursor’ is rage inducing. The AppleTV remote (current, not previous gen) is the least bad system I’ve come across.
• ctm92 9mo ago
  Kids grow up with it and know everything way before the grown ups. They can't even stand up but already know how to unlock an iPhone (back in the days when there was slide to unlock)
  • mcny 9mo ago
    I always find it amusing when I see a toddler knows to press skip ad on YouTube.