Unknown Stakeholders

Are you overlooking someone in your user research?

It may not have the romance of flowers or diamonds, but a good universal remote control can do good things for a gadget-lover’s marriage. Before we got a high quality universal remote, there were remotes all over and a page of instructions for guests. My wife grew to understand it, but she hated that I’d complicated such a simple task as watching a movie. More often than not, she’d just turn the TV on by hand and listen to it through the native speakers. Now, she just hits the DVD button on the remote and everything turns on (well, most of the time!) so she can watch a show in 5.1 Dolby Digital surround even if she doesn’t care much about it.

So, if you were writing the product specification for a universal remote control, would you have thought to include your user’s significant others, house guests, and friends? You would surely have included the owners of home theater systems as a significant stakeholder in the design. They want equipment with a ton of features, high performance, and customization. Unfortunately, those requirements might not be as well accepted by the rest of the household if the system is difficult to use. Could you have unknown stakeholders that are preventing a purchase? Should they even be your primary target for the user interface?

Are there stakeholders that have been ignored during the design of your product? Are they holding back the success of your product? How do you find them?

Preparing for the Digital TV Transition

I get most of my news and entertainment online instead of through the television. But, we still turn on the weather or PBS cartoons in the morning, so we needed to prepare for the upcoming “digital transition”. Here’s a summary of how I chose a converter box and built an antenna. Did I miss anything? What did you do?

As you’ve probably heard, Congress and the FCC are requiring full-power television broadcasters to drop their analog signal and go completely digital. The date for this transition was originally scheduled to be February 17, 2009, but it was postponed recently to June 12, 2009. According to the FCC, they plan to use the “discarded” analog spectrum for public safety communications (fire, police, rescue squads, etc.) as well as auction off portions to private companies for the expansion of more advanced wireless programs such as wireless broadband. Regardless of why Congress has federally mandated a technological shift for television broadcasting, it appears to be happening. Even with the postponement, there is no reason for you to wait.

Note: If you’re a cable/FIOS/Satellite subscriber, you don’t need to worry. The digital transition is only for over-the-air (OTA), broadcast television that you’d pick up with an antenna.