requirements from the marketing point of view and uh obviously our starting point with marketing is always market research um so that's where we started we used our our usability lab the company's usability lab we did our usual selection methods to get a cross section of the general public male and female all age groups from fifteen upwards and um we observed them in the lab just their general use of the remote control you can see we had a hundred subjects there our findings lots of findings i've just summarised some of them here the overall thing which i've i've 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 um we found that seventy five percent of users find most remote controls ugly eighty percent would spend more money when a remote control would look fancy we were quite surprised by that finding but um that's quite a high proportion of our our you know international target group are prepared to spend more money for something that's a bit nicer looking um current remote controls do not match well with the operating behaviour of the user overall for example you can see below there seventy five percent of users zap a lot so you've got your yeah person sunk back in the sofa channel hopping so again there's power implications there um fifty percent of users only use ten percent of the buttons so again a big design issue there um and possibly we can also cut back on cost if we don't have so many functions actually on the remote control um the biggest frustrations that people found with regard to personal preferences were um something that you you mentioned earlier uh remote controls are often lost in the room it's a slipping down the back of the sofa type of thing uh fifty percent were were particularly frustrated by that uh thirty four percent of people take said they take too much time to learn to use and i think that ties in with the um the previous finding of people only using ten percent of the buttons they just can't be bothered to learn about the other functions um um slightly more than a quarter of people said it was bad for uh repetitive strain injury you know those small movements of the remote control can lead to kind of shoulder and elbow problems um the vast majority of the thirty five and under age group would like um a liquid crystal display and speech recognition again that was to aid i think in uh when they've lost the actual remote control some kind of speech recognition something we didn't put to them but which i'm thinking of now is um even if perhaps the lost control can give off a bleep every now and again til you find it or a flashing light possibly um that trend reverses in the older age groups so thirty fives and unders who would like those two features that kind of evens out thirty five to forty five and in the older age group it kind of reverses they're not so bothered with this i kay had marvellous tables and things that i could show
