help it is up there that screen is black alright okay okay that is fine 0 god are we done right okay this is our 2nd meeting and i might be a bit all over the place right our agenda for today do you want us to give you a 2nd no that is okay sorry okay i will go over what we decided last meeting we decided upon a universal control one handset for all t v video equipment sorry that it was important that the product was accessible to a wide range of consumers wide age range not limiting anyone we decided it was important to reflect the company is image in our product we put fashion in electronics you know that kind of s thing our budget would have to affect try not to reflect our budget that we might have a bit of 00 you can see it okay dissonance between what our budget was and what we want it to look like want it to look uncluttered undaunting to the customer we discussed a flip open design reducing the size of the control and an electronic panel for further features like programming things like that okay 3 presentations i have got written here so shall we hear from marketing 1st is it okay if i postpone that til later i just want to get access to a little bit more information is that okay no that is fine that is fine okay yeah i will go 1st can i grab the unplug me thanks what do i have to press 0 f 8 f n function f 8 0 right yeah okay maybe yep yep there we go okay this is the working design presented by me the industrial designer extraordinaire kay this is where i went a bit mad with powerpoint so what the 1st thing question i asked was what are we trying to design well a device which basically just sends the signal to the t v to change its state whether that be the power or the channel or the volume everything is just some sort of signal to change the state of the t v or other appliance that it is sending the signal to so i decided i would have a look at what th other people have designed and try and take some inspiration from that but although we will want to be taking ideas from other people we want to make sure that our design stands out and i thought that was something that well it was not really my area because i am dealing with the inside really so yeah i ran out of time so i could not do this one as fun as the last one and i found out that most controls use some form of infrared to send signals to the t v presumably because of the cost issue of something like the same thing that computers use wireless and you do not need to send very much information most of them are powered by some form of battery now our one i am i am not sure whether we want to look at the size issue because most of them are powered by triple a batteries but those can be quite bulky so i d i did not know if you wanted to look at something else so we could shrink down the size of the control could i can i interject to ask a question there is that appropriate yeah sure you are saying the triple a batteries are small or the surrounding it no no if you if you look at if you look at most remote controls they are quite they are quite chunky and that is because of the size of the batteries they have to be obviously this certain size to fit those batteries in right the triple a s are the smallest you can get are they not right yeah the the well you can you can get the sort of circular round ones but i am just wondering about power consumption and how much you need to send the data across they are okay 0 i see okay and d which leads sort of onto the next point about em being small and easy to carry round now the ones at the moment are small but i was just wondering if we could look at something a bit smaller now the main components i came up with were obviously the power source for the batteries cause otherwise it is not going to work as i said about the w which batteries we were going to choose we can discuss that later and then you obviously need something to decode the information that you are putting in from from the controller and to turn it into an i infrared signal which we are going to use to send the information now these have a wireless range of up to about 5 meters which is sort of suitable for anyone who is watching the t v unless they are in a cinema which not most people do so as we are applying to the most audience that should be fine and then i was just had a quick look at the external design but i d i left that mostly to the interface designer and so this is what i had as the basic idea of what we want to do it is not a proper circuit i am not sure if it would work or not i am not even confident that those are the real the real way you would wire it up but anyway we have just got the the power going to the infrared bulb with the chip and the u i interface which would basically when you when you pressed anything it would the chip would convert it into some form of i r data which could be decoded by the t v receiver which obviously means that we are going to have to conform to whatever whatever form of communication that the t v s are already using and since that that is another use and reason to use that infrared because that is what all t v s use at the moment and then finally we want the it to be available to a wide audience at a low cost so all the components that i have put forward are low in cost so that that should be good it should should be different enough from the alternative products to get a good consumer base we were talking about it before and also just something that i was thinking about because they are small they are also easy to lose so if we could look into some way of d dunno some anti going down the side of the sofa thing that you could have i th that was just sort of a general point there and that is yeah that is a very important part it came up in our market research findings too so i can refer to that whenever you like me to present alright okay and yeah that is that is what i came up with there so if you want to okay thank you very much would you like to continue on from that yep ooh kay or maybe move the laptop over it can be okay that is okay with me further oops why is it not working f 8 right f function function f 8 yeah okay why is it in the right no the plug has not come out at the bottom has it yeah it is connecting no no no yeah it is just meter adjusting okay 0 there yeah actually some of my points might overlap with what william is just mention but basically my method was like whatever brainstorming we did in the last meeting yeah just a couple of valuable points and started developing on that and there might be some missing loops in this thing which i think we will take a feedback from the marketing because i have not had some marketing data and basically every product is marketable so purpose as william already said i would put it to simplify the interaction with t v to make make it as simple as possible and to summarize i i would say it is it should be user friendly by being easy to use rather than having a lot of complex button because you can have an engineering maybe having 100 buttons and maybe having a remote control which has the main features like volume control or channel ch changing the channel or whatever but we are to to make it unique so that people want to buy it will this 2 features together so what the concept is to have a flip top model the main functions such as which are like often used will be on the top and the complex functions which say you you can say like the y young generation or trendy generation want to pr say program their favorite channels or whatever can be put in the middle part of the f flip top so it is like it could be accessed by a wide ra range of audience and we can punch in new f features such as added features such as shock proof body and maybe a design to appeal to a lot of people findings most people prefer us user friendly rather than complex remote controls because there are times like people have used a remote control for say a year or something and they they are not used maybe 30 to 40% of the buttons so it is not of no use of punching in the trying to put in those things in on the top of the remote control and try to confuse the user as we saw we we have to make a profit also so we we can maybe go for an economies of a higher production by 50000000 we said yeah yeah with that i think we will be able to achieve economies of scale also so we can give in add in more features and make it less costly that is so this is if you ask me personally i would make flip top with a trendy design and s maybe we we should look at also like the buttons whe whether they are like soft or little hard because they are times when the buttons tend to be a bit hard after continuous use usage and all that yeah so in overall a simple and user friendly design any comments like if you want kay i think we will chat about it at the end okay okay so if anyone wants to write something down that they want to bring up at the end kay yeah sure ooh it is vibrating that is strange 0 god right okay have i got to keep this here i think you will have to you can not does it matter it will have to this can not be pulled i will have t i will have to move it will not i we just do the best we can whoops you will have to push it a bit more will it manage bit more 0 dear yep yeah this is more than enough there we go i have got a bit more of the cable okay 0 there we go is that okay yeah i think you can pull it out now thank you just pull it closer a little bit you should be able to and yeah there you go yeah you might get it right over okay thank you ah look at that okay i am going to look at the functional requirements from the marketing point of view and obviously our starting point with marketing is always market research so that is where we started we used our our usability lab the company is usability lab we did our usual selection methods to get a cross section of the general public male and female all age groups from 15 upwards and we observed them in the lab just their general use of the remote control you can see we had a 100 subjects there our findings lots of findings i have just summarized some of them here the overall thing which i have i have got at the top there in italics is that users dislike the look and feel of current remote controls so it has obvious design implications there we found that 75% of users find most remote controls ugly 80% would spend more money when a remote control would look fancy we were quite surprised by that finding but that is quite a high proportion of our our you know international target group are prepared to spend more money for something that is a bit nicer looking current remote controls do not match well with the operating behavior of the user overall for example you can see below there 75% of users zap a lot so you have got your person sunk back in the sofa channel hopping yeah so again there is power implications there 50% of users only use 10% of the buttons so again a big design issue there and possibly we can also cut back on cost if we do not have so many functions actually on the remote control the biggest frustrations that people found with regard to personal preferences were something that you you mentioned earlier remote controls are often lost in the room it is a slipping down the back of the sofa type of thing 50% were were particularly frustrated by that 34% of people take said they take too much time to learn to use and i think that ties in with the the previous finding of people only using 10% of the buttons they just can not be bothered to learn about the other functions slightly more than a quarter of people said it was bad for repetitive strain injury you know those small movements of the remote control can lead to kind of shoulder and elbow problems the vast majority of the 35 and under age group would like a liquid crystal display and speech recognition again that was to aid i think in when they have lost the actual remote control some kind of speech recognition something we did not put to them but which i am thinking of now is even if perhaps the lost control can give off a bleep every now and again til you find it or a flashing light possibly that trend reverses in the older age groups so 35s and unders who would like those 2 features that kind of evens out 35 to 45 and in the older age group it kind of reverses they are not so bothered with this i had marvelous tables and things that i could show you but i think i will just keep it simple kay if there is any more information i can email you extra details is that okay okay that is fine okay yeah right huh we have new project requirements we are not going to be using teletext apparently the consumers consider it outdated with the internet now okay our control is only going to be for t v it is not going to be a combined control which limits you know all of the different things that it limits the cost for us but it also makes it easier to understand for the consumer so can we not program a video with this remote control it says for t v only so looks like it is just yeah i think maybe sky things like that might be incorporated into it but just channel hopping i do not know what do you think it just said for t v only would that imply video use but i mean general t v controls do do video as well t yeah yeah i d well i dunno cause the w if you have g i mean you bu well som you get com you get combined t v and videos do not you yeah yes if yeah and if you got if you got a sky box they have one of those plus boxes you can record straight off the t v anyway so on to on to like the t v hard drive or so i think we assume that it is still got play and stop functions and programming yes anything about that on the market research or something like regarding whether people want a combined something like that yeah we did not really look into that but remember we found that finding that most people only use about 10% of the buttons 10 perc i think th th those do tend to be the basic channel hopping things and on and off for the video fast forwarding yeah so on and i think it is sort of general knowledge that people do find programming their videos a nightmare okay so i do not know if that is something we need to look at ju just as an idea on the speech recognition thing that pr it would probably be quite expensive to incorporate an entire speech recognition thing and they are not that great anyway pens in fact i have just called up that table there we asked those 2 questions the table relates to both questions so we did not differentiate alright okay would you prefer an l c d screen that is multi function remote and would you pay more for speech recognition in a remote control alright okay so you can see how the the yes no sort of varies across the age group there yeah and a substantial number of do not knows in the older age group i think that is just general fear of new technology yeah bu yeah but on on that again i just thought cause you can get those key chains now and you whistle and then it will let off a loud noise to let you know where it is so i thought that could be quite a 0 yeah right we do have a budget limitation that we can not control ourselves so i think when we can take a cheaper option which still does the same kinda thing because it is something i it needs to be the thing that you use to find it needs to be something that you do not lose you were saying whistling yeah yeah maybe on the t v you could put like a pack on the t v or something so you can not see the remote you go and press the button on top of the t v and it beeps and you are like 0 okay it is over there yes yeah okay that is a super idea something like that but that is that sounds a lot cheaper to me yeah yeah the 3rd thing was that we have to make sure the corporate image is very much incorporated into the handset so we want logo we want fashionable trendy i mean what you were talking about with the marketing people paying more for it to look good we need to focus on that as well yes further market research will be needed to kind of focus on what that is it is going to be different for a 15 year old th for somebody who is 60 and also across the world if we are aiming at the international market yeah what is attractive to a trendy new yorker and what is attractive to a retired south african i dunno you get the idea it is it is going to vary around the world at the end of the day th the engineering design is one thing it is the user interface design that may and th the sort of you know fashionable aspect of it we might have to change for different markets round the world yeah yeah so are we talking of a single model or maybe 56 designs sure well y yeah you could you could have a number of different designs i mean inside they would be essentially exactly the same alright right just yeah yeah the features could be same and the body could look slightly different yeah so what about you were talking about the buttons the controls that are coming out now have kind of big yeah rubber buttons not tiny little one big rubber buttons but what about i mean cause we got to make it original kay what about you know with the touch screen computers yeah yeah that is what i was just yeah yeah so you it is like a little panel that you touch rather than a button which should not wear out as much either not sure about the no well no cause you would not have to you do not actually have to press them you just you do not have to press it you just have to put your thumb onto it yeah think that might appeal i am thinking kind of japan i am thinking young office people trendy kind of a thing yeah yes it will appeal to sections of the market def but quite easily labeled so that anyone can 0 yeah that is obvious what that is for and it is not daunting to maybe the older generations but also er ergonomics as we are saying with the different designs ergonomics there is sort of physically different things cause if you have ever seen the x box they had to make 2 different sized controllers because people in japan would not buy it because the controller was physically to big because were too big they are c just generally japanese people have smaller hands so they could not get round the controller which is so if you i do not know what cause you obviously you can have bigger buttons for some countries or something and smaller ones for others yeah maybe to as it it was indicated that risk of repeated use the injuries maybe a touch screen could be a better option for that yeah yeah so a bigger b okay so y you are dividing designs based on not only segment age groups you are desi dividing it according to the countries also the market maybe for u s and all you can have a slightly bigger remote control and maybe in japan and all you need to have a small yeah yeah i think we have to design one product and then the company can take it wherever they want to in the sense that they can make it smaller huh yeah or they can make it bigger or they can change the features slightly yeah th the internal d engineering design has got to remain the same yes absolutely it is going to be the same so we need to focus on just one thing not get bogged down in lots of different possibilities yeah i am concerned when you read the the r s i issue again repetitive strain injury i do not think just moving your finger around on a small screen is going to deal with that enough i think that is still a kind of a question mark issue how we deal with that r s i tends to be caused by repetitive small movements yeah i am j i really can not get my head round this one this may have to be postponed to a future meeting but it is something we should think about yeah i yeah i was just thinking about how you could combat that cause without without doing something where you have to move your arm around to change the channel and it becomes yeah i know and it becomes ridiculous yes i know or a speech recognition which is extremely expensive i think that is the only way that you kind of avoid yeah speech recognition but yeah yeah yes that kind of issue do we have to initially you know looking at the findings here focus on a younger age group initially and then broaden out the market later do we really have to go for everyone right away we could focus on the biggest market ge if say people between age group of 20 to 35 are the biggest market and when we have been throwing up our ideas we are automatically talking about business people young people trendy people we are we are talking about the type of company that we are working for as well that they want it to be fashionable they want it to be trendy and you would not automatically assume associate that with the older generations now with the baby boomers the older generations are actually larger they have a greater population than us young people yeah but i do not think we are focusing on that i think we are focusing on a sort of mid range business kind of class type people i am just thinking of budgetary issues too for when it does get to the sort of broad scale marketing stage we want to you know not waste money not be profligate and you know focus on where the idea will be taken up 1st it is most likely to be taken up 1st of all where the main purchasing power is coming from for a product like this okay so the remote control functions we have got the t v we have got the video now there is i can not remember what it is called the little code at the end of program details yes video plus we could use that as an alternative to programming in times things like that is that i always found that really easy when i discovered it yeah yeah because you have got your general record anyway so if you there is a program on you want to put record on that is fine but if you do want to tape something in 2 days time and you are not sure if you are going to just whack in the number you put the number in and it is just a number it is not a date it is not a time it is not a channel it is not when it finishes it is not anything like that it is just a number and you w yeah and you would not you would not need a whole host of extra buttons for that you just need one cause you have already got all the numbers there anyway yeah no you have already got the numbers for typing in anyway right i have not come across that function but it sounds wonderful it is after if you look in the newspaper t v guide or any t v guide there is a 5 it is not 6 digit number afterwards and that is the number you put in and it is recorded that it is going to be on on tuesdays at 100 clock on the 17th so you do not have to worry about dates and you do not have to worry about times yeah ah right and it has been around for quite a long time it has been been around for a long time it is just it is not very well advertised as to how to use it and things no it is not but i think if awareness was kind of brought to the forefront about that superb yes though if y if you have got something like sky anyway you can just click on it you can just press the button on the program once and it will record that program when it is on and you press it on it twice and it will record the whole series right excellent so that yeah but just to have that function would be would be really good right okay so can i just run this past you while it occurs to me i do not mean to quickly jump from one subject to another but just discussing the different age groups and targeting the different age groups it occurs to me to produce our own mobile phones that that is kind of what led us on to comparing t v remote controls with with their design features chain companies like carphone warehouse you can pop in anytime with a phone that you bought for them w if you have got any problems with it and they will fix it they will phone the company you can use their telephones yeah is it worthwhile with with our retail outlets having a a similar kind of service so that if older users were deterred from buying this if they know they can just pop into one of our high street outlets th you know which button is it i press for this th as free as a free aspect of our service would that not make it more attractive to them but the only problem is that with a mobile phone you signed for a contract so they the companies who who you deal with have actually they have they have got an obligation to to help you out and also i mean it is it is fair enough to have some sort of help service but i i am not sure how much the cost would be of having right the functionality of it in the sense that you are sitting there you are pressing this button and your t v is not doing it alright taking your t v and your control and saying look this is what i am doing it is not working what should i do yes if it was something as simple as you could not change the channel but i mean for if there were any more or are we absolutely definite it is only going to be for t v and video we are not going to put any okay just a thought yeah i mean i think so i mean instru instruction books i feel c i reckon can cover that instruction manuals okay but i mean they are there is customer service there will be a customer service number thing that you can phone up and speak to and that way there is no call out charge yeah department yeah sure there is no extra t the person has to walk to a shop on the high street right yeah i think it will be too much of an effort for a person to for a phone maybe he might walk down the street yeah but for a remote he will just refer to the manual and all that not for such simple functions because we are focusing on that yes okay and they are yeah they should be f yeah but we should focus on making the manual as user friendly as possible because a lot of them are just tiny little writing and lots and lots of pages simple yeah yeah puts people off reading them so they just do the obvious yes it is the yeah it does you just put it in the drawer until something goes wrong and then you try and search through it so that should be something we think about sure okay what other functions we need i am not sure if we need a design decision now but we should think about c cause you have got the dilemma between 0 batteries that is what i was thinking about mobile phone batteries what kinda battery is that they are they are specially made for the for the mobile phones but they come with a charger i mean you could you could bundle a charger in with it but well they la they they last quite a long time and if you had when you th the thing that you get with mobile house phones yeah you sit it in its charger when you are not using it or t at night or something yeah but it does not really matter cause it never really runs out cause it lasts a long time once it is charged yeah something like that should reduce the size of it yeah and if yeah if you if you had if you had one of those just coming back to your other point about pressing the button and setting off the bleeper in the room that could yeah it could be on that yeah okay yeah on that as well so s so are we talking of a concept of a rechargeable something on the remote yeah some sort of docking station or yeah yes rechargeable with a docking station so the rechargeable which would be your yeah yeah th yeah that that would be fine and also that would mean they would not have to go out buying batteries all the time field okay yes which it is cheaper in the long run as well right yeah th the shape you got trendy i do not want to big box with lots of things you do not want a tiny sort of little thing either because then you have got the repetitive strain injury no matter how many how much you try and make it simple and we do not w i mean so many remote controls look absolutely identical these long they do yeah brown things with the same colored buttons all crammed in on the s the surface we definitely an ob an obvious thing a very simple thing is to get away from these brown rectangles we do not want that okay so we have got a flip screen okay what i was thinking of a design which nokia h came up with almost 6 or 7 years back basically we have a flat one it it looks like a box like a chocolate yeah that is very strenuous because your thumb is slightly up so they came up with something like this curled up so here and you do not have to you do not bend your thumb too much so it is like you can say a banana shape kind of thing curled up like a boat slightly curved curved yeah okay g so what happens is you do not have to press your thumb too down like so it is already curled up so your thumb does not y yeah so we can have a s like you know molded according to your cause it is kind of molded to your hand anyway yeah the way you h hold of it is kind of semi circular in the bottom something like that okay i would not say exactly semi circular but yeah smooth can you look into the company logo things that are associated with the company in view to trying to incorporate that into the design of the product current i mean for example if it was a c or something like that you could have it in a vague c shape that opens up kind of like a shell or something something along those lines to be able to incorporate it quite obviously into the design while also making it quite different from anything else that is there we could look in at that but i mean look at the mobile what we were talking is to make it more rather than like sea shells logo could become as you could put a logo in the corner of the model rather than you know trying to make it like a sea shell or whatever you were ta telling like well we need to think about how it is going to look different i think that is that sounds a really attractive idea i have not come across anything like that before if it kind of yeah and that opens out into your flip top a sea shell yeah then it is nice t to h you can make it lightweight plastic nice to hold in the palm of the hand and just because you are having to actually insert in between the 2 covers that is going to take care of some of the repetitive strain injury trying p prevent a lot of that i would think i think it is a really nice idea and plus you can get you know even though we are using plastic yeah we could look in at that you can still i mean think of the designs you can get in plastic we can do a nice conch shell or scallop shell exterior or you could do different like you get with mobile phones different fascias you could have different kind of casings yeah so you could have like psychedelic ones for younger people and sleek ones and less chance of it being lost too it is not like a chocolate brown lozenge that is going to go down the sofa and people might want to put it on their mantelpiece or whatever as a ki if it looks attractive enough as a kind of ornament they do not not going to lose it so much either yeah it is easier to bit nice to handle yeah maybe we could come at some say 5 6 des designs and then choose which are whichever appeals the most like that could be the most common design okay yeah okay okay okay but we can like think of 56 designs right i think we have to round it up can i just quickly go over the new project requirements so that i have not missed anything sure so it is no teletext it is only for t v and by implication video our corporate image should be incorporated in the remote control something about videoplus that was in cutting down the number that was kinda separate that was cutting down the number of functions right right making it simpler so instead of having lots of things you put in for date right so when they press for programming you it comes up on the l c d a reminder about using videoplus so that they have a look at the guide and or was is this nothing to do with the project requirements is this just that was an add on feature it is kinda takes the place of having a button to press for the date and having the button to press for the channel things like that huh right right so it is kind of doing away with the programming feature it could be it c it yes it could be adv advertisement feature rather than design feature you know drawing attention to that yeah right and it also paid lip service in the instruction manual cause it is very simple so putting it down in words should be helpful and the rechargeable batteries yeah was there anything else there that we in the new new project requirements yeah we have got the buttons but i think we will work through that with the design of it yeah that is not at the moment a requirement it is something we are looking at yes what preference so it may come round to market research at some point to see what people would like yes and we have talked about there being an alarm or something a beeping for being lost for detection right yeah learning how to use it should be as simple as possible but there are not going to be that func that many functions incorporated into it so it should be fine and the i the instruction manual i do not know if we deal with that i think yep and different from what is out there yep i think okay yep i think that is us what would you specifically like marketing to look at before the next meeting true okay or shall i just sort of generally look at all the issues involved i think you might get guidance but i th instruction manuals cause there tends to be a okay demonized thing u they are everyone has got like a big pile of them but no one really uses them okay whoops questionnaire 4 oops we should f yes right cause we are at lunchtime now i think okay i think it is time for us to get back to right okay i think you can email me if there is any more questions and i will be able to not answer them
help help maybe is that there it is green flag it does not it does not it does not it is not really true 0 okay right okay and i might be a bit all over the place right our agenda for today do you want us to be a 2nd no that is okay sorry i will go over what we decided last meeting we decided upon universal control one hand set for all tv video equipment that it was important that the product was built a wide range of the consumers wide age range not limiting anyone we decided it was important to reflect the company is image in our product with the fashion our budget would have to affect try not to reflect that we might have to affect try not to reflect our budget that we might have a bit of 00 you can see it like dissonance between what our budget was and what we wanted to look like wanted to look unclettered undomenting to the customer we discussed a flip open design reducing the size of the control and an electronic panel with other features like programming things like that 3 presentations i have got written here so show you here from marketing 1st is it okay if i postpone that till later to spawn that to later i just want to get access to a little bit more information is that okay okay yeah i will go 1st can i grab the like me thanks press press alt f 8 okay press alt f 8 fn function all right maybe okay this is the working design presented by me the industrial design extraordinary okay this is where i went a bit mad with powerpoint the 1st thing question i asked was what are we trying to design well a device which basically just sends the signal to the tv to change its state whether that be the power or the channel or the volume everything is just some sort of signal to change the state of the tv or other appliance that it is sending the signal to so i decided i would have a look at what other people have designed and try and take some inspiration from that but although we will want to be taking ideas from other people we want to make sure that our design stands out and i thought that was something that well it was not really my area because i am dealing with the inside really yeah i ran out of time so i could not do this one as fun as the last one and i found out that most controls use some form of infrared to send signals to the tv presumably because of the cost issue of something like the same thing that computers use wireless and you do not need to send very much information most of them are powered by some form of battery now r one i am not sure whether we want to look at the size issue because most of them are powered by aaa batteries but those can be quite bulky so i did not know if you wanted to look at something else so we could shrink down the size of the control can i interject to ask a question there is that appropriate you are saying the aaa batteries are small or the carouser ed no no if you look at most remote controls they are quite chunky and that is because of the size of the batteries they have to be obviously this certain size to fit those batteries triple a is are the smallest you can get well you can get the sort of circular round ones but i am just wondering about power consumption and how much you need to send the data across and which leads sort of on to the next point about being small and easy to carry round now the ones at the moment are small but i was just wondering if we could look at something a bit smaller now the main components i came up with were obviously the power source for the batteries because otherwise it is not going to work as i said about which batteries we were going to choose we can discuss that later and then you obviously need something something to decode the information that you are putting in from the controller and to turn it into an infrared signal which we are going to use to send the information now these have a wireless range up to about 5 meters which is sort of suitable for anyone who is watching their tv unless they are in a cinema which not most people do so as we are applying to the most audience that should be fine and then i just had a quick look at the external design but i left that mostly to the interface designer and so this is what i had as the basic idea of what we want to do it is not a proper circuit i am not sure if it will work or not i am not even confident that it is the real way you would wire it up but anyway we have just got the power going to the power the infrared bulb with the chip and the ui interface which would basically when you when you pressed anything the chip would convert it into some form of ir data which could be decoded by the tv receiver which obviously means that we are going to have to conform to whatever form of communication that the tvs are already using and since that that is another reason to use infrared because that is what all tv is using and then finally we want it to be available to a wide audience at a low cost so all the components that i have put forward are lowing costs so that should be good it should be different enough from the alternative products to get a good consumer base we were talking about it before and also just something that i was thinking about because they are small they are also easy to lose so if we could look into some way of i do not know some anti going down the side of the sofa thing that you could have that was just sort of a general point there that is a very important point it came up in our market research findings too so i can refer to that whenever you would like me to present and yeah that is what i came up with there thank you very much would you like to continue on for that yep maybe move that okay that is a good just to put it still further i think it is a function i think it is a function i think now the plug has not come out at the internet it is just it is it has time okay yeah actually some of my points might overlap with what william is just mentioned but basically my method was like whatever brainstorming we did in the last meeting just took up a valuable and started developing on that and there might be some missing loops in this thing which i think will take a feedback take a feedback from the marketing because i have not had some marketing data and basically every product is market driven so purpose as william already said i would put it to simplify the interaction with tv to make it as simple as possible and to summarize i would say it should be user fendry by being easy to use rather than having a lot of complex buttons because you can have an engineering driven maybe having 100 buttons and maybe having a remote control which has the main features like volume control or channel changing the channel or whatever but we are to make it unique so that people want to buy will punch in these 2 features together so what the concept is to have a flip top model the main functions such as which are like often used will be on the top and the complex functions which say you can say like the young generation or trendy generation want to say program their favorite channels or whatever can be put in the middle part of the flip top so it is like it could be accessed by a wider range of audience and we can punch in new features such as added features such as shockproof body and maybe a design to appeal to a lot of people findings most people prefer user friendly rather than complex remote controls because there are times like people have used a remote control for say a year or something and they are not used maybe 30 to 40% of the buttons so it is not of no use of punching in the trying to put in those things in on the top of the remote control and try to confuse a user as we saw we have to make a profit also so we can maybe go for an economy of a higher production by 50000000 we said yeah yeah with that i think we will be able to achieve economies of scale also so we can give in adding more features and make it less cost me that is so this is if you ask me personally i would make a clip top with a trendy design and maybe we should look at also like the buttons whether they are like soft or a little hard because there are times of the buttons tend to be a bit hard after continuous usage and all that so in overall a simple and a user friendly design any comments i think we will chat at the end okay okay so if anyone wants to write something down i want to bring up to the end okay i will have to move it will not i whoops i will push it a bit more can it manage a bit more yep 0 dear okay i have got a bit more is that okay yeah i can put it out on thank you just pull it up through a little bit you should be able to get it right over thank you okay i am going to look at the functional requirements from the marketing point of view and obviously our starting point with marketing is always market research so that is where we started we used our usability lab the company is usability lab we did our usual selection methods to get a cross section of the general public male and female all age groups from people all age groups from 15 upwards and we observed them in the lab just their general use of the remote control you can see we had a 100 subjects there our findings lots of findings i have just summarized some of them here the overall thing which i have got at the top there in italics is that users dislike the look and feel of current remote control so that has obvious design implications there we found that 75% of users find most remote controls ugly 80% would spend more money when a remote control would look fancy we were quite surprised by that finding but that is quite a high proportion of our international target group are prepared to spend more money for something that is a bit nicer looking current remote controls do not match well with the operating behavior of the user overall for example you can see below there 75% of users zap a lot so you have got your person sunk back in the sofa channel hopping so again there is power implications there 50% of users only use 10% of the buttons so again a big design issue there and possibly we can also cut back on cost if we do not have so many functions actually on the remote control the biggest frustrations that people found with regard to personal preferences were something that you mentioned earlier remote controls are often lost in the room it is the slipping down the back of the sofa type of thing 50% were particularly frustrated by that 34% of people said they take too much time to learn to use and i think that ties in with the previous finding of people only using 10% of the buttons they just can not be bothered to learn about the other functions slightly more than a quarter of people said it was bad for repetitive strain injury you know those small movements of the remote control can lead to kind of shoulder and elbow problems the vast majority of the 35 and underage group would like a liquid crystal display and speech recognition again that was to aid i think in when they have lost the actual remote control some kind of speech recognition something we did not put to them but which i am thinking of now is even if perhaps the lost control can give off a bleep every now and again until you find it or a flashing light possibly that trend reverses in the older age groups so 35s and unders who would like those 2 features that kind of evens out 35 to 45 and in the older age group it kind of reverses they are not so bothered with this i had marvelous tables and things that i could show you but i think i will just keep it simple if there is any more information i can email you extra details is that okay right we have new project requirements we are not going to be using teletext apparently consumers consider outdated with the internet now our control is only going to be for tv it is not going to be combined control which limits all of the different things that it limits the cost for us but it also makes it easier to understand further so can we not program a video with this remote control it says for tv only so it looks like it is just channel hopping yeah i think maybe sky things like that might be incorporated into it but i do not know what do you think it just said for tv only would that imply video yeah yeah do you do video as well i do well i do not know because you get combined tv and videos yeah if you have got if you have got a sky box one of a sky plus boxes now you can record straight off the tv anyway to say on to like the tv hard drive or something i think we assume it still got there and start functions programming yeah anything about that on the market research or something like regarding whether people will not have combined something like that we did not really look into that but remember we found that finding that most people only use about 10% of the buttons i think that those did tend to be the basic channel hopping things and on and off for the video fast forwarding so on and i think it is of general knowledge that people do find programming their videos are nice so i do not know if that is something we need to just as an idea on the speech recognition thing it would probably be quite expensive to incorporate an entire speech recognition thing and they are not that great in fact i have just called up that table there we asked those 2 questions the table relates to both questions so we did not differentiate would you prefer an lcd screen that is a multifunction remote and would you pay more for speech recognition and remote control so you can see how the yes no sort of varies across the age group there a substantial number of do not knows in the older age group i think that is just general fear of new technology but on that again i just thought because you can get those key chains now and you whistle and then it will let off a loud noise to let you know where it is so i thought that could be poor we do have our budget limitation that we can not control ourselves so i think when we can take a cheaper option which still does the same thing because it is something it needs to be the thing that you used to find it needs to be something that you do not lose you were saying whistling maybe on the tv you could put like a pack on the tv or something so you can not see the remote you go and press the button on top of the tv and it beeps yeah okay it is over there that is a super idea but that sounds a lot cheaper to me the 3rd thing was that we have to make sure the corporate image is very much incorporated into the handset so we want logo we want fashionable trendy i mean what you were talking about with the marketing people paying more to look good we need to focus on that as well further market research will be needed to kind of focus on what that is it is going to be different for a 15 year old for somebody who is 60 and also across the world of framing at the internet national market what is attractive to a trending new yorker and what is attractive to a retired south african i do not know you get the idea it is going to vary around the world at the end of the day the engineering design is one thing it is the user interface design that may and the sort of you know fashionable aspect of it we might have to change for different markets around the world so are we talking of a single model or maybe 56 design well yeah you could you could have a number of different designs i mean inside they would be essentially exactly the same like just if we just could be same and the body would look yeah yeah so what about we were talking about the buttons yeah the controls that are coming at now have kind of big rubber buttons not tiny little big rubber button but what about i mean because we have got to make it original what about you know with the touch screen computers yeah yeah yeah so you it is like a little panel that you touch rather than a button which should not wear out as much either i am not sure about no no because you would not have to you do not actually have to press you just have to put your thumb onto it yeah i think that might appeal i am thinking kind of japan i am thinking young office people trendy it will appeal to sections of the market but quite easily labeled so that anyone can say 0 yeah that is obvious what that is for and it is not daunting to maybe the older generations but also ergonomics as we are saying with the different designs ergonomics there is sort of physically different things because if you have ever seen the xbox they had to make 2 different sized controllers because people in japan would not buy it because the controller was physically too big because they are cut just generally japanese people have smaller hands so they can get around the controller which is so if you i do not know what because you obviously you could have bigger buttons for some countries or something and smaller ones for others maybe to as it was indicated the risk for repeated use the injuries maybe your touchscreen could be a better option for that yeah yeah okay so you are dividing designs based on not only segment age groups you are dividing it according to the countries also the market maybe for us and all you can have a slightly bigger remote yeah and maybe in japan and all you need to have a small i think i think we have to design one product and then the company can take it wherever they want to in the sense that they can make it smaller or they can make it bigger or they can change the future slightly the internal engineering design has got to remain the same it is going to be the same so we need to focus on just one thing and not get logged down in lots of different possibilities i am concerned when you raise the rsi issue again repetitive strain injury i do not think just moving your finger around on a small screen is going to deal with that enough i think that is still a kind of question mark it is you how we deal with that rsi tends to be caused by repetitive small movements i really can not get my head around this one this may have to be postponed to a future meeting but it is something we should think about yeah i was just thinking about how you can combat that because without doing something where you have to move your arm around to change the channel or speech recognition yeah speech recognition which is extremely expensive i think that is the only way that you can avoid that kind of issue do we have to initially you know looking at the findings here focus on a younger age group initially and then broaden out the market later do we really have to go for everyone right away focus on the biggest market and when we have been throwing up our ideas we are automatically talking about business people young people trendy people we are talking about the type of company that we are working for as well that they want it to be fashionable they want it to be trendy and you would not automatically assume associate that with the older generations now with the baby boomers the older generations are actually larger they have a greater population than us young people but i do not think we are focusing on that i think we are focusing on a sort of mid range business kind of class type of people i am just thinking of budgetary issues too for when it does get to the sort of broad scale marketing stage we want to you know not waste money not be profligate and you know focus on where the idea will be taken up it is most likely to be taken up 1st of all where the main purchasing power is coming from for a product like this okay so the remote control functions we have got the tv we have got the video now there is i can not remember what it is called little code at the end of program details video plus yeah we could use that as an alternative to programming in times things like that yeah is that i always found that really easy when i discovered it because you have got your general record anyway so if you there is a program on you want to put record on that is fine but if you do want to tape something in a few days time you are not sure if you are going to you put the number in and it is just a number it is not a date it is not time it is not a channel it is not when it finishes it is not anything like that it is just a number and you would not need a whole host of extra buttons for that you just need because you have already got the numbers there anyway i have not come across that function but it sounds wonderful it is after if you look in the newspaper tv guide or any tv guide there is a 56 digit number afterwards and that is the number you put in and it is recorded that it is going to be on on tuesdays at 100 clock on the 17th things like that so you do not have to worry about dates and you do not have to worry about times and it has been around for a long time it has been around for a long time it is just it is not very well advertised no it is not i think if awareness was kind of got to the forefront about that so if you have got something like sky anyway you can just click on it you can just press the button on the program once and it will record that program when it is on and you press on it twice and it will record the whole series excellent so that yeah but just to have that function would be really good can i just run this past you while it occurs to me i do not mean to quickly jump from one subject to another but just discussing the different age groups and targeting the different age groups it occurs to me we already produce our own mobile phones that is kind of what led us on to comparing tv remote controls with their design features chain companies like carphone warehouse you can pop it any time with a phone that you have bought for them if you have got any problems with it and they will fix it they will phone the company you can use their telephones is it worthwhile with our retail outlets having a similar kind of service so that if older users were deterred from buying this if they know they can just pop into one of our high street outlets you know which button is that i press for this that is a free aspect of our service but that not make it more attractive to them but the only problem is that with a mobile phone you signed for a contract so they the companies who you deal with have actually they have got an obligation to to help you out and also i mean it is it is fair enough that i have some sort of help service but i am not sure how much the cost would be right the functionality of it in the sense that you are sitting there you are pressing this button and your tv is not doing it all right taking your tv and your tv and saying look this is what i am doing it is not working on what should i do if it was something as simple as you could not change the channel but i mean if there were any more or are we absolutely definite it is only going to be for tv and video yeah i think so okay just a thought i mean instruction books instruction manuals okay but i mean there is customer service there will be a customer service number thing that you can phone up and speak to and that way there is no call out charge there is no extra person have to walk to a shop in the high street i think it would be too much of an effort for a person to for a phone maybe he might walk down the street but for a remote he will just not for such simple functions because we are focusing on that yeah we should focus on making manual as user friendly as possible because a lot of them are just tiny little writing and lots and lots of pages it puts people off reading them so they just do the obvious it does just put it in the drone until something goes wrong and then you try and search through it sure that should be something we think about what other functions i am not sure if we need a design decision now but we should think about because you have got the dilemma between 0 batteries that is what i was thinking about what about our phone batteries what kind of battery is that especially made for the mobile phones but they come with a charger i mean you could bundle a charger they like they have been last quite a long time and if you had when you the thing that you get with mobile house phones you sit it in its charger when you are not using it or at night or something but it does not really matter because it never really runs out because it lasts a long time when it is charged something like that should reduce yeah and if yeah if you had one of those just coming back to your other point about pressing the button and setting off the bleeper in the room that could yeah it could be on that yeah on that as well okay so are we talking of a concept of rechargeable or something yeah some sort of docking station or rechargeable with a docking station yeah so the recharge would be your yeah yeah yeah that would be fine and also that would mean they would not have to go out buying batteries all the time yeah which is 2 from the shape you have got trendy i do not want a big box with lots of things you do not want a tiny sort of little thing either because then you have got the repetitive strain in the matter how many how much you try and make it simple and we do not i mean so many remote controls look absolutely identical these long brown things with the same colored buttons all crammed in on the surface we definitely an obvious thing a very simple thing is to get away from these brown rectangles we do not want that okay so we have got a flip screen what i was thinking of a design which nokia came up with almost 6 or 7 years back basically we have a flat one it looks like a box like a chocolate that is very strenuous because your thumb is slightly up so they come up with something like this curved up so here and you do not have to you know bend your thumb too much so it is like you can say a banana keep kind of curved so what happens is you do not have to press your thumb too down like so it is already curved up so you kind of mold it to your hand anyway so we can have a like you know mold it according to your yeah the way you hold of it is kind of semicircle in the bottom something like that i would not say exactly semicircleal but yeah you into the company logo things that are associated with the company in view to try and incorporate that into the design of the product i mean for example if it was a sea or something like that you could have it in a vague sea shape that opens up kind of like a shell or something something along those lines to be able to incorporate it quite obviously into the design while also making it quite different from anything else it is fair we could look at that what we were talking is to make it like seashells logo could become you could put a logo in the corner of a model rather than you are not trying to make it like a sea shell or what you are telling you well we need to think about how it is going to look different i think that sounds a really attractive idea i have not come across anything like that before if it kind of yeah and that opens out into your flip top and it is nice to help you can make it lightweight plastic nice to hold in the palm of the hand and just because you are having to actually insert in between the 2 covers that is going to take care of some of the repetitive strain injury trying to prevent a lot of that i would think i think it is a really nice idea and you can get even though we are using plastic you can still i mean think of the designs you can get in plastic we can do a nice conch shell or scallop shell exterior or you could do different like you get with mobile phones different fashes you could have different kind of casings yeah you could have like psychedelic ones for younger people and sneak ones less chance of it being lost too it is not like a chocolate brown lozange that is going to go down the sofa people might want to put it on their mantle piece or whatever if it looks attractive enough as a kind of ornament and they are not going to lose it so much either it is easier to be nice to handle yeah maybe we could come at some say pizsic designs and then choose which will appeal sometimes that could be the most common design okay if we can think of 56 reasons right i think we have to round it out can i just quickly go over the new project requirements so that i have not missed anything so there is no teletext it is only for tv and by implication video the corporate image should be incorporated in remote control something about video plus that was in cutting down the number that was kind of separate cutting down the number called functions making it simpler so instead of having lots of things so when they press for programming it comes up programming it comes up on the lcd reminder about using video plus so that they will look at the guidance or is this nothing to do with the project requirements is this just that was an add on feature it kind of takes the place of having a button to press for the date and having the buttons press for the channel things like that so it is kind of doing away with the programming feature yes it could be an advertisement feature rather than design feature you know drawn attention to that and also paid lip service in the instruction manual because it is very simple sort of putting it down in words should be helpful and there be chargeable batteries was there anything else there that we new project requirements we have got the buttons but i think we will work through that with the design of it that is not at the moment a requirement it is something we are looking at what preference it may come around to market research at some point to see what people are going and we have talked about there being an alarm or something a beeping for being lost learning how to use it should be as simple as possible there are not going to be that many functions incorporated into it so it should be fine and the instruction manual i do not know if we deal with that i think yeah and different than what is out there okay yeah i think that does what would you specifically like marketing to look up before the next meeting or shall i just sort of generally look at all the issues involved i think you might get guidance but in short of the manuals because there tends to be a demonized thing there everyone has got like a big pile of them but no one really uses them okay oops questioner phone yes right okay okay okay i think you can email me if there is any more questions i am not yet