The IT Nerd

I don’t hate it, but I’m not in love with it either. Why? Here are my reasons why I don’t like the Quick Start Guide:

• It’s in a 4:3 format. Why not an option for 16:9 for those with widescreens? It would look better.
• I tried going to “What’s On” followed by “TV Mix.” Pressing kids got me a screen with six kids channels on it. The other two (News and Sports) got me a screen saying that I was “Not Authorized” and I had to order them. Perhaps I’m on the wrong cable package or something? It would also be nice if I could build my own display of six channels being displayed on the screen at once.
• Some of the scrolling is slow. Not good from a user experience standpoint. The funny thing is that if you press the Guide button twice, you get to the old channel guide and the scrolling is way faster in that.
• The games that are part of the Quick Start Guide don’t do much for me personally. Rogers might want to replace the games with something else more useful.
• It would be nice to be able to tailor the guide to display the stuff you want to see (like your favorite channels for example).
• If you click “Self Service” and “Need Help?” you get the ability to reboot the Rogers Terminal. There’s no other help other than a technical support number. I think Rogers really missed an opportunity to deflect technical support calls by not doing more with this feature (such as providing access to their knowledge base).
• Give the user the ability to turn the Quick Start Guide off if they desire. That’s not a bad thing as it gives users the ability to control their television experience.

Here’s what I like about it:

• The ability to reboot the box via the remote control is a feature that might come in handy.
• The ability to display the weather forecast in a couple of clicks is handy.

I think at the end of the day Rogers had the right idea, but the implementation wasn’t that great. Hopefully they listen to all the negative feedback in places like Twitter and on this blog and improve this feature so that users actually like it instead of loathe it.

UPDATE: It turns out that the reason why I can’t see anything on the other two TV Mix channels is that I am on the wrong package. You need the VIP Package to see the news and sports TV Mix. It might be of value to not have those TV Mix options displayed if you don’t subscribe to the VIP Package.

This entry was posted on January 21, 2010 at 7:59 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.