Why are remotes for cable boxes so cluttered and complicated? Is it so that they amp up the cognitive load for users in hopes that they will be too lazy to learn how to expertly skip commercials, as the author of this post suggests? I don’t buy that since cable companies don’t have any incentive to control how customers view their content.
They do, however, have incentive to keep costs down and we can be sure that they partner with hardware manufacturers who will build dirt cheap remotes. Simplifying the complex is difficult and time-consuming. Problems that are difficult and time-consuming are expensive to solve. Slapping on a button for every single function in the spec is simple. And simple is cheap.
Thoughts?
