Jason Oster — a product manager for the Crestron Home™ platform — has been studying the way people interact with technology for decades. “There’s a lot of misnomers and misconceptions about terms such as ‘user interface’ and ‘user experience,’” he notes. (For example, the two aren’t interchangeable: an interface is just one aspect of the user experience.)

There’s an absolute Step One when it comes to creating an effective, intuitive UI, according to Oster. “First you need to clearly define the problem,” he says. “I think people just jump right in and start drawing pretty buttons. Stop — sit down and define what you're trying to solve.” Are you building a media platform to attract more users and engagement? Or are you trying to make a home automation control that the user can understand instantly?

If the latter’s your goal, understanding just who’s using the interface is the next step. Oster explains: “If you put on the hat of the end user, and then you put on the hat of the dealer, and then you put on the hat of a guest user of the house — then you begin to see the issues that you may be facing.”

That notion of getting inside the head of the person at the other end of the process is critical to intuitive design. In fact, the Stanford d.school — a part of the university built specifically to inform the design choices of everything from tech to health care solutions to the organization of non-profits — has archeologists on staff to help students understand how humans have interacted with the things they’ve designed both past and present. Steve Wozniak, one of the inventors of the original Apple® computer, summed the philosophy up succinctly in a pre-pandemic talk at Purdue University: “The user is more important than the technology.” Ultimately, machines are only as good as the ease with which they’re operable.

“We've taken cues from other UIs that need to be task driven.”
– Jason Oster, Crestron

Hands-On Observation

Oster and his team undertake usability studies — and to solve a specific problem, they make sure that what they’re offering is task-based, not UI based. They’ll gather a group of volunteer subjects, and present them with a task and a device. Oster describes the process: “Okay, you want to open your garage door? Here's some user interfaces; three or four designs. We don't give the user test group any instructions. We make it very discoverable. And then we compare them. We know where they press, we know how long it takes for them to scan a screen, the time spent looking for a button, and so on.”

And where does the inspiration for those three or four solutions come from? “We've taken cues from other UIs that need to be task driven,” says Oster. An excellent example: the controls you’d access from the driver’s seat of a luxury vehicle. “That interface obviously has to be a very quick ‘read’ — the user needs to understand the vehicle’s control systems literally at a glance.” Take that speed of recognition, apply it to an AV or lighting control interface, and you’ve got the “secret sauce” that makes a UI truly intuitive.

There’s also the accumulated history of design at work here, says Oster. “For most of us, our thumb gravitates towards a tab bar at the bottom of an interface because 10,000 other apps have that feature. We’re often using those known design patterns in the industry, such as swiping and so on.” Those patterns become kind of a universal user vocabulary. Oster notes that the Crestron Home platform now features no less than 26 languages besides English — but the text will become somewhat irrelevant fairly quickly. “After you use an app a few times, you’re not really reading text anymore — the living room image suffices. Do you even notice the word ‘Facebook’ on your phone lately? You’re not reading anything — you’re just pushing that ‘f’ button.”

As far as aesthetics, Oster is committed to what’s called “white space” — open, airy looks that don’t crowd an interface with icon upon icon. “They’re vastly easier to read,” he says. As far as colors, making things look beautiful is important, but those with sight deficiencies need to be addressed, too. “We can’t forget our color-blind friends,” says Oster, “so a red signal that tells you something’s offline needs to be accompanied by an exclamation point or some other notation.”

“We're learning based on dealer feedback; based on what the data is showing us.”
– Jason Oster, Crestron

The Promise of Voice — and the Future of Sensorization

Of course, voice control is another option — and it’s certainly handy in a variety of applications. (Ever been handling raw chicken when you needed to brighten the task lighting where you’re working?) The challenge here is the fragmentation of this segment. “There’s a lot of different companies, and those different platforms don’t work and play well with one another — we're injecting control into that,” says Oster.

“When we started Crestron Home, we mostly focused on environmental voice controls, like being able to adjust your temperature and lights,” says Oster. “My family uses it every day in my house. It's a lot easier than reaching for the remote, especially when you're going to bed,” he adds. “But now, we are about ready to release control of music playback via Alexa for Crestron DM NAX. After configuring the Alexa groups, I can simply say ‘Play [any band name Amazon knows about].’ It plays almost instantly over the DM NAX amplified speakers in that same room, instead of on the small smart speaker. No need to mention the room you want to play it in.”

There are, however, times when voice isn’t convenient — vocal commands when everyone else in the house is already asleep are clearly impractical. Ultimately, according to Oster, the amount of sensorization that will ultimately be introduced into the home will be able to react to a variety of commands, including gesture. Imagine a space that will really know who you are — and can react accordingly after it recognizes you.

What’s more, says Oster, “As far as the architecture for our control systems, we've already been doing edge computing for years. We have a processor that is likely the most powerful thing in the house. That's on the edge of the internet. If the internet goes down, your Crestron Home system will still work the same with these analytics.”

But the best part about modern controls and user interfaces for Oster is their ability to evolve. “It's not a one and done — for every update, we're tweaking things slightly. We're learning based on dealer feedback; based on what the data is showing us.

“It's simply not like the old days where you make a product, you ship it, you're done. The stuff we’re building adapts.”