FWIW, a couple of observations based on my experience with baby monitors. (4 kids and years of baby monitors tend to give one an opinion on them... ;)
--Lights on the monitor: My wife and I usually have one on all night, and those little volume and power lights are so bright we have had to cover them up, even then they were still almost too bright. It would be better to make it very clear what the channel is and use some sort of hardware indicator other than light to indicate volume that is easily understandable from a distance. That or put a dimmer or off switch on the lights for nighttime use. (It's also the case on the one in my son's room, the light's woken him a couple of times--it's the brightest thing in the room. A glowing green something. Who's gonna want to sleep when they can examine that?) --Channel selection: We've often just bought 2 of the same monitor for simplicity, so we can have one upstairs, one downstairs. In the past, we'd have 2 little ones taking a nap at the same time in different rooms. Telling who was crying by looking at the monitor itself was difficult even if we knew what channel each was on. -ty On Oct 12, 2007, at 9:20 AM, Alok Jain wrote: Hmm may be following will do the trick.. -Volume - Yes a volume indicator. Also, no need to hae a separate led indicating if the monitor is not. just volume control indication will implicitly communicate the device is on. - Channel Selection - this I think is not just an indicator problem, it's slightly deeper and about why should one be required to change the channel in multiple places (base station and receivers), allowing for it to be changed in one place which updates everything else will eliminate the need for this concern altogether. (Optimizing for human performance as opposed to system performance) Camera issue - I think several cameras do this well, a simple toggle switch with only led light as an indicator should solve this. further the light can be physically close toe ht on/off toggle button, so indicator is visually tied to the action. Cheers AJ On Oct 12, 2007, at 9:45 AM, Matthew Nish-Lapidus wrote: > Wow, those are all great answers. > > So, now the question is, what type of state indicator/button would > help solve these issues? For the baby monitor, would it be helpful to > have an obvious volume level indicator? > > I completely understand the camera example.. My little digital > point-and-shoot does the same thing and it can be quite confusing.. > especially when the screen turns off and I hand the camera to somebody > else, they always think it's off. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://gamma.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://gamma.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://gamma.ixda.org/help
