Poor Product Design

Back in March I purchased a Logitech Harmony universal remote to do more research into the use of protocols used by Air Conditioner Remote Controls. I wanted to write about my thoughts at the time, but did not want to release what we were working on. So now, many months later, I am releasing these comments. The remote control was a great geek you – it had all the normal buttons you would find, a colour screen, and the ability to download IR commands from over 225,000 devices all over the Internet. Sounds so simple.

Well, that is if you are wanting to control a TV, or something fairly common. Go to something less common, and you are generally out of luck. And the worst thing is that the software will not tell you this, ever. When you want to add a new device to your remote, you tell it the make, and then the model. When you enter the model you are then given a list of similar models that you can choose, presumably with all the codes already loaded. You can then define macros, and upload the commands to the Harmony remote. And then you go to use remote. And find that none of the keys seem to do anything for your Air Conditioner.

So you log into the software, and see that there are zero pre-defined keys for the remote you added. Or at least none that I could find. So, rather than saying to the user ‘Hey, we know that model exists, but you will need to add the buttons for us’, they just let us add the remote, and let us work out what is going on. The thing is, I have yet to actually find a single Air Conditioner with codes in their database. And I have been looking.

Crowd Sourcing the commands is valid, but there needs to be some feedback to the user as to if they are the ones who need to do the crowd sourcing. To do otherwise just alienates the user.