Challenge 16 0f 52: TV Input UI

Taking early paternal leave made me sort of a TV junkie. As I also cleared my schedule from meetings and projects, suddenly I find myself spending much more time in front of TV. Naturally, I spotted a few things to improve about the device UI.

With so many set-top boxes connected to the TV, figuring out the connection can be a daunting task. Physically, there’s so many ports and there’s no clear label. Many are only labelled with embossed plastic text which is hard to read since it’s the same color as the device. The solution should be bright color-coded label to mark all the various ports

Once connected to the TV, the UI is not helpful either. The on-screen label simply says HDMI 1, HDMI 2, and so on. It’s certainly not very helpful for most user. The UI should be more proactive by asking the user what is the connected to each port when a new connection is made. Certainly it’s not that hard to provide soft label for DVD, Blu-Ray, Cable, Laptop, Game and so on.

Even better, the TV can have a connection map screen in the menu. It will display all the devices that is currently connected to the TV according to the physical location of the ports.