05.02.2008 — It should always be the goal of the designer and programmer to make a system’s user experience as painless as possible.

Whether the interface for your client’s system is a series of keypads and touch panels throughout the house, or just a single remote control in the TV room, you must design for user friendliness.

Here are the three cardinal rules to incorporate into your design philosophy.

Consistency is King

Button names and functions should be identical throughout the house, including their location. That means that commands like “lights up” or “lights down” are located in the same position on the control in every room.

If you have three rooms with televisions, the handheld remotes for each room should have identically labelled commands.

Standardization right down to the visual layout of the commands serves two purposes: it makes controlling the system second nature to the homeowners, and it saves hours of programming time since you can cut and paste duplicate commands in your control software.

Remove Unnecessary Buttons

“Why do we even have that button?”

That expression became a regular meme in meetings at my old office whenever the design and programming teams met to discuss the functions and controls of client’s automation systems.

There’s a scene in the Disney film The Emperor’s New Groove, where, as the heroes approach the fortress of the evil sorceress, she bids her henchman to pull a lever that will spring a trapdoor under the heroes’ feet, plunging them into a pit filled with crocodiles.

Unfortunately for her, before she can yell “No, not that lever!” he pulls the wrong lever, opening a trap door underneath her instead. As she stomps back into the control room, soaking wet and with a crocodile clamped onto her, she curses, “Why do we even have that lever?”

At my old office, shouting out “Why do we even have that lever?” was shorthand for expressing our frustration with any redundant or confusing step in the control tree.

Keep It Simple!

As designers and programmers, you decide what the client has access to. You wouldn’t put a big red button in the middle of the touch panels that says “REFORMAT ALL!!!”

While it might seem like a drastic example, you should avoid control trees that either have the potential to leave clients hopelessly confused or able to screw something up.

Keypad programming is a perfect example. Many vendors offer keypads that can have layered commands: Click once for lights on, then again for brighter, then again for off.

Layered commands work well enough for lighting control, since everybody has a few floor and table lamps that operate on that principle. But when you start dealing with things like source selection and volume control, you’re just going to lose, confuse, and irritate the homeowners.

Don’t forget the maxim that just because you can doesn’t mean that you should. With any interface, pare down what you actually need to do and keep it simple.

No matter whether your projects involve cinema rooms, whole home control, or villain’s lairs with secret entrances and alligator pits, designing a streamlined, simple and consistent user interface should always be your top priority.

Lee Distad is a freelance CEDIA Certified Professional Designer who offers design and process consultation to firms in the Custom Installation industry, as well as copy writing and other professional writing services. Lee’s business and industry blog can be read at http://www.leedistad.com