the anti experience of Ed

It was heralded over postcards, a voice mail on my home phone, my cable box messages…. the new Program Guide and DVR interface is now on my Motorola cable box here in Seattle!

Let’s get this out of the way. I hate, hate, hate this box. It’s incredibly flaky to the point that I can’t trust it to record a program properly without dropouts or crashes. The interface is clunky. There’s no intelligent managing of recorded content and the to-do list like my still-hooked-up Series 2 tiVo. But it doesn’t cost me much more per month to have the DVR, because I’m already paying for high definition programming and needed the HD box, and my tiVo doesn’t do high-def.

I had recently reformatted and resetted my DVR, so it had no recordings and no subscriptions on it. Weeds Season 3 (drool) finally started up again last night, and there was a new Big Love on as well. So I figured I’d give the new DVR a spin and set up some recordings for the girlfriend and I to watch later on this week.

Fine. Yes, the Interface is now totally different. I can’t exactly say that it’s better or worse than the previous interface yet. It doesn’t feel faster or slower. But when I went to search for Big Love, I noticed something somewhat different in the text input interface. Instead of the expected on screen array of letters to scroll through to enter “B…I…G……” I saw something that looked like this:

Wait, what? I have a Masters degree in Interactive Technology. WTF is that?!?!?!

I then realized what was going on. You remember how you entered your name when you won a high school at an arcade game? These games had no keyboard, usually just a joystick and a few buttons, so you had to scroll the numbers, letters and punctuation for each of the three letters you were usually alloted for your initials or some dirty word.

This interface works the same way as those arcade games, except it was five letters.

I’m not saying that this is a horrible interface. It isn’t. In some cases, it might actually be faster than an onscreen keyboard, and it definitely takes up less space on the screen. I can see how it may require explanation to some folks though - it’s not as immediately obvious as an onscreen keyboard. Some arrows indicating that the boxes are indeed scroll boxes wouldn’t hurt, as a start.

What bothers me though is, why not adaptive / predictive text technologies in DVRs? They work great on cell phones, after all. All of the possible words are already neatly indexed on the DVR as the TV program listings. Let’s say I enter a “B” in the first box…. there’s no reason why I should have to scroll through letters or numbers in the second box that would lead to words or partial words that don’t exist in the listings. There’s no show that could possibly start with the string “B2,” for example, so why should I have to scroll through the number “2″ to get to a possible letter?

edit: I just also realized something as well - why not use the numeric pad of the remote controller like a cell phone number pad, with each number key corresponding to 2-3 letters? That would obviously work just fine with predictive text technologies, and is a familiar interface to anyone with a cell phone.

This is just example of how clumsy these boxes are. These are devices that are designed for the mass market, not just geeks. Pull it together guys!