Hotel Room Gadgets Confuse The Best Of Us

from the too-complex-for-all-but-early-adopters dept

While hotels are constantly looking to add funky new technologies to their rooms, it appears that they're facing some backlash from travelers who are pissed off that the technology is impossible to use. If you're using a TV, you basically want to be able to turn it on, change the channels and change the volume via a remote control. You don't want 50 different buttons with tiny, incomprehensible text. Add to that the "special" video check outs and pay-per-view system and people find themselves accidentally ordering movies and checking out in the middle of their stay. Meanwhile, others are having problems understanding hotel alarm clocks, minibars and safes. For a while, hotels were promoting "smart rooms" that would turn on the light and the radio as you opened the door. Unfortunately, when most people enter a room and the lights and radio come on, they get scared because they think someone else is in there. All of these ideas probably sounded nice on paper, but no one seems to think through the real world use case. Gadgets in hotel rooms need to be very simple and straightforward, since people are only going to use them a few times. They don't want a learning curve - they just want things to be intuitive.

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