Not A Big Fan — Everyday UI of Dyson’s Hot+Cool Fan Remote
Dyson’s “Hot + Cool” fan is their bladeless take on the traditional air cooling machine. Bundling an air filter, a heater, and a fan all into something that can fit on my bedside table, the Dyson fan is useful year round. However, where the Dyson pulls ahead in terms of multipurpose usage, it really slacks off when it comes to usability. My biggest pet peeve is the remote, shown here:
The remote itself is only about 3 inches long, comfortably fitting in the hand and making it easy to access all the buttons without much movement. The top left button is the self-explanatory power button, and to its right is a button with a blue circle that turns the machine into “cooling” mode. Directly below that is a large button with two pressable places. Pressing either of the red circles switches the fan into heating mode — the larger one increases the temperature for maintaining the room, and and the smaller one decreases it. To its left is a similar design, except these circles are for controlling cooling strength.
Right off the bat, I was annoyed by the inconsistency of the design between switching the heating/cooling system. With the current implementation, the user must learn two different ways of managing the fan. For cooling mode, they must hit the blue button, then manage the fan using the left button controls. But if they want to use heating mode, the lack of an independent heat button pushes the user to the combined strength and heat control button. I made a quick search to see if Dyson’s other remotes employed a similar design, and stumbled upon Dyson’s remote for its AM04 line:
Instead of grouping the buttons by heating/cooling, the AM04 remote employs a more intuitive button scheme by having the “strength” controlled by the left button and the hot vs. cool controlled by the right button. Perhaps Dyson may have made the switch in order to maintain symmetry between the buttons. However, I think the sacrifice of having an asymmetrical remote is worth the tradeoff of a more memorable interface.
Looking further down the remote, Dyson starts to run into learnability issues. The “clock” button is for setting the fan’s timer, but it can easily be mistaken for a time-telling option, as the fan itself has a digital display. The two arrows are for toggling fan oscillation, and the bottom two buttons are for controlling the airflow — the small cone focuses the air narrowly, while the large cone spreads the air widely. With such a small surface combined with minimalistic buttons, there is little in the way of affordances that Dyson could have included to ease the learnability. In fact, some users might not even use features such as directional flow, and thus there was no need to invest in a new design. However, since this fan is touted for its versatility, the icons should be changed to be more unique; for example, when I first learned how to use the fan, I would often confuse the wide cone button for the oscillation feature.
Another neglected feature is the usability of this remote in the dark. I have mainly identified two issues — first, I must figure which side points up, as the remote is a rectangle. Once I’ve sorted that out, I have to figure out which button is which — in situations with low light, it is almost impossible to distinguish the buttons unless you’ve memorized their placement, which is a lot to ask from the user. Even though I have had this fan for a year, I still find myself turning the light on in order to oscillate the fan. With all of this in mind, below is a quick sketch of what I think the fan remote should look like:
The buttons are grouped by temperature and strength akin to the AM04. In addition, I’ve switched out the circle icons for a +/- system, which is more indicative of function. The other icons were swapped out in order to provide more affordance to the user. The bottom two icons were the hardest to replace, but I think that the fans with arrows are clearer than the ambiguous cones. In addition, I would add lighting to the buttons so that they would be visible in the dark, but I didn’t know how to show that on my mockup.
All in all, the Dyson remote is an efficient piece of hardware that unfortunately needs some revamping when it comes to button usability and design. Through some small icon changes and button groupings, the remote becomes a more user-friendly portal to control such a complicated fan.