I was just looking at the remote control for my Comcast Motorola DVR. One of the reasons to use a DVR is the ability to skip commercials and the Motorola DVR is no exception. Except, whoever designed it may not have taken a human factors in design class.
Here's the remote:
See the two buttons I circled in red? One button is the 30-second skip (forward) button. The other is the Instant Replay (skips backwards 7-seconds) button. Which do you think is which? Call me crazy, but I'd think that the button on our right would be the skip forward button and the button on the left would skip backward.
Wrong.
I guess because the button on the left has an arrow that points up, we're supposed to intuitively know that it moves us forward. And the button on the right, having a downward pointing arrow, moves backwards. Except that this GOES AGAINST THE WESTERN CONVENTION OF READING LEFT TO RIGHT and that we tend to think of the button on the right as the one that moves forward. Tivo got it right. Even ReplayTV got it right.
Now I can sort of understand that these are the "Page Up/Page Down" buttons that function on other menus. These weren't really meant to be the skip buttons; they just added that function to them during playback. Better that than just leave them functionless. But what's strange is that there actually is a labelled Instant Replay button on there. It's to the left of the white "My DVR" button. Yes, that's right-- they knew to put the labelled Instant Replay button on the left side of the remote. But they didn't include a labelled 30-second skip button at all. In the place where I thought a 30-second advance button would be, there is a LIVE button-- a button that stops the playback of your recorded show that you're watching and takes you to what's playing on the currently selected channel (hitting the "stop" button serves this same function, BTW). Brilliant. How useful.
You just have to wonder sometimes.
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