AC remotes suck; let’s design one that doesn’t
When I teach design, my first two messages are:
- You don’t need to wait for anybody’s permission
- Opportunities for improvement are all around you
Today, I’m going to put my words into action, and show how a simple air con remote can be improved through the design method.
I hope you learn something from my process, and maybe even accept my challenge to repeat the same exercise with another device you’ve been frustrated by all your life!
Product vision
A good first step for a product design project is to define its vision — to think through your assumptions, user needs, the solution you have in mind, and its impact on the wider business (or nonprofit, community, and so on).
A good tool for this is the The Product Vision Board by Roman Pichler, which breaks things down into five simple steps: Vision, Target group, Needs, Product and Business goals.
Let’s apply this framework to our air con remote:
Vision
What is our purpose for creating the product? What positive change should it bring about?
An AC that is reliable and easy to use at night.
Target group
What market or market segment does the product address?
Business travellers sensitive to the temperature in their sleep, and staying in hotels equipped with mini-split AC units. (The reason I decided to target travellers rather than home users is that the latter have had the time to get used to their particular remote, alleviating common frustrations).
Needs
What problem does the product solve?
AC remotes are difficult to use in the dark, and when you’re half-asleep.
Product
What are we going to build and what will make it stand out?
AC remote with an intuitive layout that you can easily operate by touch.
Business goals
What business need does the product address? Why is it worthwhile for us to invest in it?
Business travellers are frustrated with AC remotes, which could affect overall satisfaction with the accommodation provided by our clients. Air cons are commoditized, and a better UX is an opportunity to differentiate within this crowded market.
Remember — your product vision should be a living document!
Start by listing your assumptions and intuitions, then adapt these over time, as you collect data from surveys, user interviews, and market research.
Market research
Most air conditioners come with cheap, infrared, monochrome remote controls — some slightly better designed than others. Surprisingly, even universal remotes rarely provide much of an improvement on the status quo.
The biggest issue is the utter lack of consistency. Even if you become accustomed to one unintuitive layout, this does not guarantee you’ll be able to operate a remote from a different air con, even of the same brand.
Notice how in the examples below, something as basic as the order of temperature control buttons is inconsistent. The One Key positions the buttons as ▼ ▲, whereas Chunghop places them in reverse order ▲ ▼.
Even remotes that were ‘designed,’ in the popular sense of the word, barely improve on the ergonomics, and sometimes make things worse by switching from tactile to capacitive controls.
Some modern air conditioners integrate with smart home mobile apps, and a number of hotels have experimented with their use, combined with the free rental of a pre-configured iPad or Android tablet available in the room.
A major downside of such app-based air con controls is they require you to look at a bright mobile display in the dark, disturbing your sleep.
There is also a risk that the mobile device runs out of battery if you forget to put it on charging.
Not to mention, AC remote users are usually not in a state to easily unlock a mobile device, find the right app, and navigate through its UI when they wake up in the middle of the night.
User interviews
I’ve conducted 10 user interviews with people who identify themselves as business travellers, and have used an air conditioner in the past (AC units are rare in some regions, such as parts of Europe or Russia).
These interviews were unstructured, but all revolved around the interviewees’ past experience with air conditioners, the particular features they have used in the past, and the frustrations they’ve experienced around their operation.
Below are select quotes from these interview sessions:
“I hate those things!”
“I only ever use the on/off button and warmer/colder buttons.”
“I just want to make the room cooler.”
“I feel too cold, feel too hot… try to find buttons to fix that.”
“I want to know how long it’ll take for the air con to reach my desired temperature.”
“I mostly use temperature control, fan speed and swing.”
“AC remotes are stupid. Never understood them.”
“Put it on auto, set ideal temperature and speed to 2, and be done with it.”
“I use Turbo mode when I come into a really warm room.”
“My biggest pain point is I can never find the damn controller.”
“It can be hard to figure out a new AC remote for the first time.”
“I don’t use timers but wish to learn to someday.”
“I’d prefer ACs to be controlled by a mobile app.”
“When the aim isn’t right you have to do the whole stupid “on/off/on/off” ritual with the confused system.”
“I don’t know what half the buttons do. I understand fan speed, but “dry” and “auto” vs. “cool”? I don’t get it!”
“I’d love a hard-off slider, so I’m not wasting remote battery in the winter.”
Most interviewees only use the AUTO operation mode on their aircon, combined with the target temperature control buttons.
Interestingly, interviewees consistently described their air con use as responding to a feeling of being too hot or too cold, rather than setting any particular temperature.
That is, they did not perceive the up and down buttons as controls that change the target temperature, but rather controls that make their surrounding warmer or cooler.
Finally, almost none of the respondents understood more advanced air con features, and although some expressed a desire to learn how to use them in the future, this was clearly more out of curiosity rather than any strong need.
A fascinating idea proposed by one of the interviewees was to flip the interaction from the user telling the air con their desired temperature, to the air con asking the user whether they feel hot, cold, dry, or comfortable. I will not explore this concept in this project, as it is better suited for smart home thermostats rather than generic air cons used in hotels.
If this were a real project by an established brand, a large-scale survey of existing customers would be a valuable follow-up to these one-on-one interviews. I unfortunately don’t have the resources to conduct one for this case study, nor could I find relevant research papers on the topic.
User persona spectrums
This project is an interesting case study for user persona spectrums, and how they can be more useful than individual named personas.
A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups. It shows how that motivation can change depending on context.
To take one of the Microsoft Inclusive Design examples, a user can fall on the Blind end of a Vision spectrum for various reasons.
They may be permanently blind from birth, temporarily recovering from eye surgery, or situationally dealing with screen flare from the sun.
We can observe something similar with hotel guests operating AC controls.
Our users may be legally blind. But they may also be operating the remote in the dark, placing them in the same exact spot on the Vision spectrum.
Vision
Users operating the remote in the dark and the visually-impaired can’t see the screen and controls.
Blind ................................ Sighted
From here, we can identify two more relevant spectrums — dexterity, and familiarity with our remote. Here too, users may be slow to operate the device for various reasons. Some permanently, and some situationally, when using the device at night, and in a new environment.
Dexterity
Users operating the remote at night are slower to process information.
Slow ................................... Alert
Familiarity
First-time hotel guests are unfamiliar with the remote control.
Unfamiliar .......................... Familiar
Business travellers may also be more time-sensitive, and place more importance on quality sleep (such as before an important meeting), but these assumption would need more research to be validated or disconfirmed.
Mockups
Criteria
The basic criteria for our design are:
- The remote must be easy to use by first-time users, in the dark, ideally by touch alone
- The remote’s price and battery life should not be affected
Features
Based on our user interviews, the central features of a remote control are
- Turn on/off the air con
- Increase target temperature
- Decrease target temperature
Most air con users don’t appear to ever touch other buttons, or even understand what they do.
Temperature controls
We are fortunate to deal with a rare case of an internationally universal pattern.
Across the world, high temperature is associated with the upward direction, and low temperature — downward.
It therefore makes logical sense to position the Temperature increase button at the top, and the Temperature decrease button below it.
Unfortunately, the lack of consistency between air con designs… ehm… conditioned users to mistrust such logical patterns.
To makes these buttons even easier to identify by touch, let’s change their shape to arrows ▼ ▲ — another universal human pattern, stemming from our hunter-gatherer roots.
To make these buttons even easier to find, without substantially increasing the cost of the remote, we could also make them phosphorescent (glow-in-the-dark).
Power button
Another type of controllers famous for their bad design are TV remotes. But, they are surprisingly consistent in one feature — the shape and placement of the power button.
The ON/OFF button is almost universally placed in the top-left corner, usually coloured in red, and tends to have a round shape, which also happens to match the IEC Power Symbol ⏻.
I can’t think of a more established pattern for the power button, and given that most people are at least familiar with TV remotes, it makes sense to adopt it for our air con project.
There is a case to be made for the separation of the ON and OFF buttons.
Due to the unreliability of infrared remote controls — an unfortunate limitation of the low-power constraint for this project — it often takes several presses to figure out whether the appliance is currently on or off, and get it to the desired state.
Such UI would be high unusual, however, with no equivalents in other common remotes. It would therefore require much more user research and usability testing, which I do not have the resources to conduct for this project.
Another ‘power user’ solution would be to interpret a long press of the power button as OFF at all times, but this too would be a highly unusual pattern, and would require custom programming of the receiving device.
Operation modes
Most air conditioners come with five modes of operation: AUTO, Cool, Dry, Fan, and Heat.
Many ACs also feature an additional Turbo mode, which operates at full capacity for 15–30 min before switching back to the previous setting.
It would be ideal to find out the frequency with which most people use individual modes. In the absence of such data, I will make some assumptions from our user interviews, personal experience using air cons, and observing others across different countries over the years.
First, most people always keep their air cons in AUTO mode. Both because it’s the default, and because it intuitively adapts to the target temperature selected by the user.
Heat and Cool modes can be useful for climates that consistently require both heating and cooling in the same day, but offer marginal benefit to most users. Other forms of heating also tend to be more efficient than using an air con for this purpose.
Dry mode is handy in humid climates, and can reduce your electricity bill under the right conditions. Most people are unlikely to resort to this mode on a regular basis, and particularly in a hotel setting, humidity is better regulated by a dedicated appliance.
Fan mode is equivalent to a ceiling fan, and given that, at least in most tropical countries, rooms come commonly pre-installed with both, its use is rarely a good idea.
Most traditional remotes feature a single button that rotates through all five modes. This not only slows you down, but also makes it impossible to switch to the correct mode without turning on the light to see the display.
Instead, I chose to separate each mode into individual buttons, starting with oversized AUTO and Cool (the two most common modes), followed by smaller Dry, Fan and Heat.
Both the ordering of operation modes and their icons are surprisingly consistent across different air con makes, so I chose not to change things too much on that front.
Fan speed
As a less commonly used feature, I positioned the fan speed selector below the two Operation mode rows, and directly under the Fan mode button.
Here too, most traditional controllers resort to a single button that rotates through HIGH, MED and LOW.
I used a second up & down rocker instead, which more closely matches the way people think about changing the fan speed.
This time, I did not use a triangular shape for the buttons, as users might mistake them for temperature controls while navigating by touch in the dark.
This also seemed like a good place to place Vertical and Horizontal swing buttons, which are intuitively associated with the fan operation.
Time settings
The last row is reserved for automating the air con based on the time of the day, and buttons allowing you to update the current time in the appliance.
This feature is both least commonly, and least frequently used, especially by business travellers — our target user group for this project.
Display
Ah, we forgot the last piece of the puzzle! Where do we pace the display?
Although we tried our best to make the remote operable by touch alone, the screen is indispensable for some functions (ex. setting the current time), and beneficial for many others.
To preserve our tactile, oversized power and temperature controls while keeping the size of the remote within reasonable limits, I went for an elongated, vertical LCD rather than the more common square.
This has minimal impact on component price, as elongated display panels are widely available for use in calculators.
On the display itself, the target temperature is shown at the very top, both because it is the most important piece of information, and so it doesn’t get covered by your thumb when tapping the ▲ and ▼ buttons.
This problem could also be solved by moving the display to the left side of the remote, but that would disrupt the intuitive positioning of the power button.
Following the target temperature, we’ll display the fan speed, current mode, and current time.
The full mockup
Below is the final mockup of the entire remote control, with some minor modifications. Familiar, yet much more intuitive and tactile than what you’d usually find in your hotel room.
I replaced the second oversized button with TURBO, which my initial user testing has shown is actually a beloved feature, at least among some air conditioner users.
Moving the Cool button below has also made for an intuitive row of basic modes of operation, and as an added bonus, made that whole section more pleasing to the eye.
In an actual physical product, it may be a good idea to emboss the four primary buttons — ON/OFF, ▲, ▼, AUTO and TURBO — with braille, which would make the remote more accessible for blind users.
There was a cool project submitted to iF by Donghua University, for an AC remote specifically adapted for blind users.
Unfortunately, the refreshable braille display would make such a remote very expensive, and unlikely to be adopted by the mass market.
It would also be desirable if the remote tapered off at the top.
This would make it not only more ergonomic, but also easier to orient correctly by touch alone.
It’s your turn!
Given that our priority is for this remote to be easy to use in the dark, by touch alone, user testing can only be done with a physical prototype.
It would be easy to make one using some paper, foam board, and a little glue — or even an Arduino board and a soldering iron… if only I could access any of these during the quarantine.
If any of you have the time to do some handicrafts over the weekend, I can’t wait to see your creations in the comments.
For everyone else, please take this as a challenge to apply the design process to another unintuitive tool or appliance in your surrounding, and share a link to your case study!
