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Previous: Comcast customer service | Main | Next: Nokia charger
November 14, 2005 07:51 PM
Broken: Hotel room control panel
Andreas Constantinou points out:
This control panel in Chengde, China is a typical case of an over-engineered user experience that is really broken. It's a central control panel for a hotel room typical of high-end hotels in China, probably considered a must-have luxury.
There are several reasons why this is broken:
- If you try to turn on the TV using the remote control it doesn't work. My first thought is that the TV is broken. After careful inspection, you have to turn on the TV through this control panel, then zap through then channels.
- All the buttons are the same color, have a similar shape and are organised in a flat hierarchy. There is no sense of a contextual grouping. Are the channel/volume buttons for the TV, the music, or the world time?
I think the temperature setting is for the Heating / Cooling system.
I've seen too many of these things, mostly mounted solid in the night table in between beds.
you'd think the hotel would have the presence of mind to put it's city in the selection list of world times.
_@_v[:::::::::::)~~~~ [(___)ΓΈ]
and dammit! where's the button for the trap door so i can send mister bond into the tank of sharks with frikkin laser beams attached to their head...
I came across a similar control panel I came across in a hotel in Italy (and I submitted it to this site a month or 2 ago but haven't seen it show up yet).
It had pretty much the same problems as the one shown here, plus more bonus problems:
- It was wall mounted above the night table, so you couldn't operate it while lying or sitting in the bed.
- It wasn't illuminated (except for some LEDs in some of the buttons that just illuminated themselves).
- It had an ALARM button that looked and felt just like all the other buttons, with an icon that was supposed to look like a bell, but which also looked a lot like a lamp. Guess what I pressed when I wanted to turn on the light? Luckily, no bells rang, but a little LED in the button turned on that I couldn't turn off again. No harm done though, nobody from the front desk called or came to the door.
I love it. I love playing with buttons. I just hope it doesn't reset itself so the next guy can get really frustated. Ohh, the possibilities.
Well, i know what is wrong with the tv.
It is not really broken, well:
The TVs in China have a power save feature for when you turn on the main power, it does not turn on the tv. Only pressing a change channel butten on the tv or the power butten on the remote will turn on the tv. Well, the blame i think goes to the TV makers.
"you'd think the hotel would have the presence of mind to put it's city in the selection list of world times."
ALL of China is in one time zone. Hence, if Beijing is covered, so are Harbin and Chonqing. The single time zone is a pain for people in the west of China in particular.
These bloody control panels are a nuisance, even when I was travelling with my nephew who knows the language very well. Chinese hotels are the only place I've seen them, although I have not been in very many foreign countries, and usually when I have been, I have not stayed in places up scale enough to have them. In Beijing this summer we stayed at one place that had night stands with control panels from somewhere else stuck in the room, but not connected to anything. (That was actually our only real bad hotel.)
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Previous: Comcast customer service | Main | Next: Nokia charger
Leave it to China for an overcomplicated remote. (first?)heh.
Posted by: noname at November 14, 2005 08:17 PM