PAUL OCKENDEN
Paul laments the user experience being offered with modern-day technology, but on a brighter note finds a nice button to press
Paul laments the user experience being offered with modern-day technology, but on a brighter note finds a nice button to press.
Creating good user interfaces is an immensely skilled task. You need to come up with something that’s functional yet simple. An interface that’s naturally intuitive, where you don’t need to keep referring to the manual – more likely a PDF these days – to work out how to do something.
It’s a level of simplicity that Apple largely mastered around the time of the original iPhone, although sadly those skills seem to have faded alongside Steve Jobs. Apple user interfaces are now full of “you need to know how to” where they used to be more “it’s immediately obvious how to”.
It’s not just onscreen stuff, either – physical user interfaces can also be intuitive if well engineered. As an example, I have two pocket DAB radios sitting in my desk drawer: one made by Pure, the other by Sony. The Pure radio has an okay user interface. Well, okay-ish. The Sony, on the other hand, is superb. I can remove it from the drawer with my eyes closed, switch it on, change station, adjust the volume. All without opening my eyes. I can just about switch the Pure radio on in the dark, but that’s my limit. Yet both of these radios do exactly the same job. They’re similarly sized, similarly priced, and aimed at the same audience. They ought to show the difference between these two radios at design school.
In an age where we’ve become increasingly reliant on technology, the quality of most user interfaces is shocking. So much home technology is plagued with bad UX too (we call user experience UX in the web business). As an example, at home we used to have a cheap and cheerful microwave in the kitchen – I think it cost £50 – where you just turned a knob and it went “ding” when the timer ran down. Dead simple. But when we had the kitchen revamped a couple of years ago, I bought a built-in microwave from Miele. It cost me two grand, and needs several prods of temperamental touch-sensitive buttons and two different dials turned before I can even begin to nuke my frozen spag bol. Needless to say, Mrs O still curses me for “upgrading” to these newfangled appliances.
And don’t get me started on smart home technology. Yes, I’m a great fan of home automation as regular readers will know, but take “smart” light switches as an example – most of them have utterly appalling UX. Many use touch plates rather than physical buttons, and these can be temperamental even at the best of times. Especially so if you’re wearing gloves or have damp hands. And they aren’t anywhere near as ergonomic as a traditional light switch. For example, I can nudge a light switch with my elbow if I’m carrying a heavy box – you can forget that with most smart switches. Also, with physical switches there’s a visual indication of state: you can look at the switch and see whether it’s on or off. That’s very useful for things like a light switch outside a bathroom where you can’t actually see whether the light inside is on or not. Many (but not all) smart switches h don’t have that state indication. Or else they have an LCD screen, een, which of course you can’t see in the dark! Or an LED that times mes out after a few minutes. These ese are all such simple things, yet et the people who hd design the h stuff tuff that they expect us to o pepper our homes with h hardly appear to have considered sidered ergonomics at all.
Some of you might have watched the e ITV drama Finding Alice e earlier this year. It was about bout a chap who built a smart house but t then promptly died. A running joke oke was that his
family couldn’t fathom the technology needed to open the th curtains. Except it isn’t a joke at all. As you might imagine, I inhabit inhab various online forums that deal de with home automation. In some som of them I’m an active contributor, but in many others I simply lurk. One common fear amongst many of the participants, especially some of the older members, is how their family is going to cope with all the technology technolog controlling their houses if they die d e or lose mental capacity. That’s a genuine fear for a lot of people.
I have that worry too, to a certain extent. Mrs O is fine with most technology, but she would readily admit that she isn’t an IT expert and wouldn’t have a clue about rebooting a Raspberry Pi if it hangs or editing a config file. Such things are common with “home brew” automation, but even the big budget appliance-based kit still needs occasional tweaks, reboots and firmware updates.
So I’ve tried to make sure that all of the technology I’ve installed is easily rip-outable. For example, although I use Evohome to control my heating there’s still the old-fashioned thermostat on the wall and time clock in the cupboard, and I have the smart stuff wired in parallel with it. Normally the old time clock is set to not come on, so Evohome controls everything, but if you unplug the technology the old-fashioned stuff will work perfectly well as before. Likewise there’s a box of traditional thermostatic radiator valve heads in the garage, which can replace the Evohome smart TRVs. It would take around 15 minutes tops to switch back to the pre-Evohome heating system. Much the same is true for all of the other smart home technology I’ve installed: as far as possible, it’s always been done with me not being around in mind.
Buttoned up
So far this month it probably sounds like I’ve got a bit of a downer on technology, but that’s far from the truth. I love technology when it’s done well, with great design and good UX. One of the reasons that I love my car (a Beemer, and yes, I do use the indicators) is that although it’s packed with tech like self-steering and auto-parking, and stuffed with sensors – five cameras, five radar sensors, plus 12 ultrasonic distance sensor – the controls are always in a really logical place. Whatever I think about doing I just seem to move my hand and the relevant control is right there. Sometimes that’s kind of spooky. The complicated stuff just vanishes. Perhaps the designers have the same Sony pocket radio as me!
But again, a bit like my house, the technology isn’t essential. Despite the myriad driving modes and setup options, you can just hop in and drive, completely ignoring the technology.
To my mind, one of the best elements of good interface design is a nice button. It has to be tactile though – none of that will-it-won’t-itrespond touch panel nonsense like I have on my ovens. Buttons are great because they usually just have a single function. Press the power button and your computer wakes up. Prod one of the presets and your radio changes station. Poke a doorbell and it rings. Well, unless it’s one of those internet-connected doorbells, in which case someone might get a notification on their phone in half an hour – I’ve tried most of them and wouldn’t recommend any.
I always thought that Amazon was really onto something with its Dash buttons, which it offered cheaply (and often freely) a few years back. Press one in the loo and the next day a new supply of bog roll arrives at the house. Or prod another stuck to the washing machine and it orders detergent. Very simple ideas, single function, no fuss. I thought it was both elegant and clever, but Amazon obviously disagreed, and killed the physical dash button, replacing it with a virtual button that you can swipe on your smartphone. You can probably guess what I think about that idea.
Thankfully, other buttons are available. If you’ve invested in Z-Wave or Zigbee-based home automation, you’ll find buttons available from all of the usual players. I particularly like one from Fibaro that’s modestly called The Button. It looks like the kind of button that a president might have on his desk to order a missile strike, or perhaps a can of Diet Coke. And yes, it’s available in bright red.
If you’re more into Wi-Fi control then check out the Abutton V3 ( pcpro.link/324abutton), which you should be able to pick up for around £15 if you shop around wisely, although there are places selling these for four times this. It’s based on EspressIF’s ESP32PICO-D4, and is from a Chinese company called April Brother Technology ( aprbrother.com).
The ESP32-PICO-D4 is a system in a package (SiP) as opposed to the more usual system on a chip (SoC). SiP is slightly more flexible because it can contain multiple stacked chips, so it means that not everything has to come from the same silicon die as the main
“I’ve tried to make sure that all of the tech I’ve installed is easily ripoutable”
CPU in the package. The ESP32PICO-D4 contains the main ESP32 chip (as you might have guessed from the name), which incorporates the CPU plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities alongside 4MB of SPI flash RAM, a crystal oscillator, filter capacitors and RF matching components. All of this means it’s even easier to integrate into a simple product than a normal SoC approach.
The AButton V3 is simple: when you press the button the SiP powers up, boots, and then sends a message to an MQTT broker. It then powers back down again. As it’s based on the ESP32, you programme it using the Arduino IDE, but that’s a one-hit operation usually. The internal battery life obviously depends how often the button is pressed, but the power demand is quite low, so I don’t see battery life being a problem.
If you don’t fancy all that hardware hacking and IDE-based configuration then you might like to take a look at the Flic 2 smart buttons available from the Swedish company Shortcut Labs AB ( flic.io). These are Bluetooth 5 LE buttons that you can pair with either a special hub, your smartphone or a Mac. Note that you can’t have a button paired with a combination of devices, so you can’t for example have one that triggers an event on both your phone and your Mac, but that’s really not a big deal.
The buttons themselves are just under 3cm wide and 0.75cm high. They look a lot like a typical BLE beacon. The Flic 2 buttons are an update of a similar-looking original Flic button. The V2 buttons are more robust, have better range, and longer battery life. Pretty much all the things that you’d want to be upgraded in a battery-powered button.
Using the buttons with your phone is dead easy. You just download the Flic app from the Google Play or Apple app store, and during setup make sure you give it the required permission to run in the background.
Adding a button is simply a matter of clicking the “Add Flic” button in the app, and then folding down the Flic button for around ten seconds. This initiates a pairing procedure and happens really smoothly. Your only challenge is to name the button.
After that’s done, each time you press the button you’ll hear a “ding” from your phone, and if you have the app open you’ll see the image of the Flic button bounce. The real magic comes when you configure actions that happen when the button is pressed. You can add three functions to each button: one for a sing single press, another for a double press an and a third action for a long press.
There’s a whole heap of ac actions that you can assign to a butto button press. Things such as controlling lig lights (Ikea, LIFX, Philips Hue and W WeMo, amongst others) or controllin controlling media (Spotify, YouTube, Sonos, Bo Bose, Chromecast and so on). For more advanced use, you can integrate with IFTTT or do your own HTTP requests for integrating with your own software. Plus there are silly things like a fart machine. You can see a full list of what’s av available on which platforms by headi heading to flic.io/all-functions.
Also built into the app is th the concept of Tasks. Using tasks you can chain a number of actions, including the ability to add a delay between the steps. It’s quite simple to set up but very powerful. You could, for example, have a Flic button set up to draw the curtains, dim the lights and switch on the TV and audio system.
Although the Flic buttons work well with a phone, there are some limitations. Firstly the app needs to be running all the time, which can impact your phone’s battery life. The phone always needs to be within Bluetooth range of the buttons too. That’s normally not a problem if your phone supports the long-range stuff built into Bluetooth 5, but not all handsets do.
This is where the Flic Hub comes into play. It means the buttons always talk to the hub rather than your phone, and the hub does have the long-range Bluetooth stuff built-in. Not all of the Flic functions work with the hub (see that link to the list above), but most of the important ones do. Plus the hub brings the added bonus of Apple HomeKit compatibility. There’s also Alexa compatibility – the button can trigger any routines that you’ve set up – although strictly speaking you don’t need the hub for this, as Flic buttons connected to your phone can also trigger Alexa.
The hub also has an IR blaster facility. You need to plug your own blaster in as there isn’t one supplied, which seems a bit mean seeing how cheap they are, but you’ll easily pick one up online. Just be aware that it needs a 2.5mm plug (many IR emitters come with a 3.5mm plug). There’s also an audio output socket that can be used for things like sirens or button click sounds.
The tiny hub will connect either to your Wi-Fi or via a wired Ethernet connection. Setup is very simple: for things such as providing the Wi-Fi credentials the phone app makes a Bluetooth connection to the hub. I’ve been using mine over Wi-Fi without any problems.
During my testing I’ve been really impressed with Flic. On my wishlist would be better support for the Mac app (it’s quite limited compared to the phone or hub support), and a Windows version. I also wish the system was cheaper – a single button will set you back £22, and a starter kit with three buttons and hub is £177. However, given the quality and the flexibility it’s still a product that I’d recommend. After all, who doesn’t like a nice button to press?