Acclaim for novel DVD recorder design

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 14, 2003

SurePlay, a concept DVD recorder developed by The Appliance Studio has been highlighted as an example of how electronics products should be designed at 1AD.

SurePlay, a concept DVD recorder developed by The Appliance Studio has been highlighted as an example of how electronics products should be designed at 1AD: the first international conference on appliance design, held at HP Laboratories, Bristol.

SurePlay is based on the best attributes of everyday electronic appliance design.

In developing the new DVDR design Appliance Studio has stripped out all the complex and little used DVDR features and focused on enabling a user to interact simply with the machine.

The Appliance Studio has introduced two key innovations to address usability issues which it identified in existing DVDRs: the TimeWheel to overcome laborious programming menus and the Disc Library to address the problem of finding a recording when you want to play it back.

The Appliance Studio's belief is that in developing DVD players, and subsequently recordable DVD players, consumer electronics manufacturers have bolted on the basic controls from a video cassette recorder (VCR) and added some additional buttons with little thought to usability.

"Electronics designers need to drop their obsession with technology and instead focus on user experience.

Designers are obsessed with technology and seek to cram as many functions into a single product as possible, rather than purposefully applying technology to improve the consumer experience", said Simon Lewis, Technical Director, Appliance Studio.

Appliance Studio has developed a white paper entitled "Reinventing DVDR" evaluating current DVDR designs and discussing the development and design of the Appliance Studio SuperPlay DVDR.