As computer processing capabilities increase in home theater equipment, so does the lure of manufacturers to pile on odd interfaces and features that simply don’t work, can be awkward to use, and at their worst – are so complex that consumers simply live with components not setup correctly.

It’s an ever-moving pendulum in the consumer electronics world. There’s times when consumer electronics are just packed with quirky esoteric features, then manufacturers get a better at understanding of how people actually use their products, and pull back features to make their home theater components easier-to-understand and use.

The pull back is usually not voluntary, and is usually triggered through competition. Then companies attempt to follow suit and learn from the competition.

Making the Complex Easy
Apple’s iPod met much of its success not because Apple was the first to make an MP3 player… they were the first to make a complex and involved task, easy-to-do and easy-to-understand. The complex steps of managing a computer-based music library and syncing it all to a portable playing device is not for everyone. Apple’s solution was so approachable that it allowed anyone to easily import music, make playlists, and sync their music, podcasts and videos, to their iPod.

The iPod by itself is easy-to-use, but it’s iTunes that pulls it all together. Without iTunes, users would be required to convert their music in one program, manage the files manually in folders and sub folders, and manually move that music over to the MP3 device which once connected to their computer may or may not be obvious to find. iTunes makes managing everything, and even doing some fairly complex tasks, easy and approachable.

Though Apple didn’t invent the core program that Apple bought to make iTunes (SoundJam MP circa 1999) somebody at Apple knew the piece of the puzzle that SoundJam MP could fulfill, and integrated it with the iPod.

Tinkerers and Techno-nuts
There will always be those people out there who like to tinker and play with complex solutions that offer micro-control, but they aren’t in the majority. While home theater people can be very technical, there’s just times when you want the movie to play without much work required. No muss. No fuss.

For the masses though, home theater equipment manufacturers need to make their products much easier to operate, setup, and learn, or run the risk of ruining the home theater experience!

Where the Home Theater Industry is Excelling
Right now HDTV menus are pretty easy to understand. Even with complex calibration tools made available, the on-screen menus are easy to understand. This is a long improvement over TVs in the 90s, which were really hit or miss (I thought Sony did a top notch job over all other makers back then).

There are still some issues such as:

1. Picture mode / adjustment naming conventions
2. The default “dynamic” setting which is horrendous for home usage and is really only used in the stores as consumers are drawn to the brightest set with the punchiest colors.

What could really help is a quick 1-page guide, or a startup screen/video to that educates and informs the consumer how to setup their TV for home usage. This would likely result in less returns and less buyers’ remorse for those that don’t know better.

I saved one friend’s family from giving up and returning their whole home theater by suggesting some simple calibration tricks. For those who do end up giving up…  the damage is done and it can impact home theater industry tremendously. You can be sure those with a negative home theater experience will tell others about it as well… adding to the rampant misconceptions about home theater out there.

Where the Home Theater Industry is Failing
DVD player menus can be very obscure or overly complex with difficult to understand naming conventions of features that absolutely need to be turned on to get the correct usage/performance out of the player.

With DVD players, the unconversion and widescreen picture selection menu items need to be easy to find and activate. Digital surround should be the default out with any digital cable connection, with easy-to-find audio preferences on the menu for other options. Hell, put all those toggles on the remote so people can readily click to find the settings that make the unit work as advertised.

That’s three main features: screen-type, upconversion, and audio, aside from power, eject, and the typical play/stop and menu buttons, that consumers need easy access to for their DVD players need to use to operate their DVD player correctly.

To make it perfect DVD players could have a setup menu with simple questions that triggers the first time the unit starts up or the memory has been wiped.

Slightly Failing
Receivers tend to be a mixed bag. This is simply because a receiver is the central hub of a home theater. Receivers do so much with source management, surround processing, and video routing, that it can be hard to make something this complex easy-to-setup for the consumer. In some cases, attempts to make receivers easy-to-use result in the opposite effect.

Admittedly things usually get better with price, but not always. Setting up speakers becomes easier if a receiver comes with auto-setup capability where you connect a microphone from which the receiver measures sound and correctly calibrates everything for you.

Receivers’ on-screen menus usually get better the more you spend as well. Let’s face it though, any home theater enthusiast willing to shell out $700 or more for a receiver should expect some complexity as they paid extra for more advanced features and sound quality. That’s not to say receivers that are difficult to use should continue doing so because they’re expensive.

The Worst Home Theater Component to Setup
The worst component to setup is also the one best home theater components you can buy… the PlayStation 3. Setting up the PS3’s Blu-ray audio options seems to be a menu made by an audio engineer for an audio engineer. The menu simply sucks complete ass, and is not remotely approachable.  It was hard for me, and as a technophile I know normal people won’t navigate this obscure menu. What’s most upsetting is that the whole thing could be easily fixed if you replace the interface with a series of questions about your setup.

The PS3 is stupidly set to default to 7.1 surround sound. Most home theaters that exist are 5.1, and those lucky enough to have their surround speakers setup in an ideal stereo imaging setup arguable don’t need 7.1 to fill the gaps. Even when consumers have 7.1 capability many will usually just setup 5.1 as 7.1 is viewed by many as too many damn speakers. This is a glaring flaw in what is one of the absolute best home theater components out there! A common setup setting such as this that actually affect how audio routes to your speakers should never be that hard to correct.

After the painstaking PS3 audio setup, man does it perform flawlessly.

(Quick Tip: to setup the PS3 correctly I had it do an HDMI auto setup, then went into manual to turn off all 7.1 features leaving all other audio settings as is. It can be tempting to toggle the other settings, but doing so can result in some odd sounds and possibly damage your speakers!!!!)

It’s Called “Feature Creep”
In the world of product development, when something is “designed by committee”, it’s easy for the product to end up having features and options continuously added. The end product ends up having way to many features and options that aren’t needed or will only be used by very few people. It’s definitely an example of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” It’s “feature creep” run amok.

It takes great control and usually a visionary within a company to limit what can go into the product and stay on target to what is needed to keep the product from becoming overly complex without purpose.

Keep the Computer Dorks at Bay
Another thing that can happen is that the overly technical people decide to make a product for themselves versus a product normal people will actually want to use.

Tech people are tech people, and some very much love having complexity in products that make them feel smart because the products are actually hard to use.

Take the lure of making a car stereo a touch-screen interface. While you can do some very cool things, more often than not, these systems take many more steps and time to accomplish the same task that is otherwise effortless with physical knobs and buttons.

With a physical volume knob you can feel your way in the dark to find it without taking your eyes off the road, allowing you to change the volume quickly and without hazard.

With some touch panels you have to:

1. Activate the screen
2. Navigate to the menu that has the volume control,
3. Locate the volume
4. Adjust the controls via quirky interfaces such as sliders or arrows

With some touch screens it can take anywhere from 5+ steps to adjust the volume and a lot of time, all while taking your eyes of the road.

You can apply this to any interface in consumer electronics. If a design makes it take longer and is more complicated to do the same tasks than an otherwise proven solution, it’s a bad design. It may be cool, interesting, and appealing at first, but with prolonged usage the hype/newness wears off.

Gadget Gimmickry
With the apparent embracing of computers in home theater, the problem arises in which manufacturer’s overly complicate home theater equipment, thus making everything a bit harder for the ordinary consumer to embrace. Many consumers are simply afraid of / intimidated by their computers, why would making a home theater product more intimidating be a good direction?

It seems that the home theater manufactures have come over wrought with “gadget-gimmickry”. They should study the success story, ease-of-use, and approachability that Apple computer has been pushing forward with the iPod, Computers, and Operating Systems. The iPhone is the gold standard of ease-of-use within a product segment. Not perfect, but so far above the bar.

Sadly, the result of “gadget gimmickry” is the release of consumer electronics products that are hard to use, quirky, and not consumer friendly

What To Do?
What’s a consumer to do? It can be a conundrum. Manufacturers come up with every gimmick in the book to differentiate their product with snazzy odd sounding and unimportant technical names for their add-on features.

While it may sound like a small gripe, it isn’t until you bring a piece of crap home that suffers from ill-designed menus and setup screens that you realize that it will be an awkward experience every time you use it. When this happens you may want to consider taking advantage of the return policy and vote with your dollar.

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
What’s odd is that as actual computing power has increased tremendously over the years to bring us to where we are today.

Right now manufacturers are at a crossroads where there’s so much capability offered it can be hard to narrow down the options or simply decide not to include an unnecessary feature. Oddly, it’s the lack of computing horsepower in components of the 80s and 90s that forced equipment to stay simplistic. Now it’s the excess of power that makes them complex.

The Transition from Hardware to Software
This may sum up the issues plaguing the industry. These hardware manufacturers are now getting enough processing power to effectively build complex software solutions, and in the computer world it took 30+ to get to where Microsoft and Apple are today with their operating systems. There are definitely lessons to be learned from the computer world about how to build usable interfaces. Yet another item of study would be the Nintendo Wii, which arguably is the latest easy-to-use consumer electronics device.

There’s a lot to learn from the computer industry and the manufacturers really need to get interface usability gurus, software designers, consumer advocates, and people that actually get it hired into their product development teams to make their products easy-to-use and not just “good enough”. Many could come back to say that they already have those people hired on, but their products tell another story.

Here’s hoping to a bright future with improved interfaced. We’re lucky in that some have already shown the way!