LG BlueRay Player Nit

I’ll just preface this complaint by stating that I love our LG Blue Ray player. It is used constantly to stream stuff from Netflix and to play Pandora music. From a functional standpoint, I really have no substantial complaints.

But from a maintenance perspective, I have a big complaint about the update process. It violates one of the UI best-practices- excessive verification.

When I power it on, I get a question:

“New software is available, would you like to check if your player can be updated?”

Well, sure. I’d hate to not be able play a disc or something. After a couple seconds of graphical funny business, we get the next query:

“An update is available, would you like to download it?”

Seriously? WTF was the first question about? Why would you alert me that updates are available, ask me to verify if the update is available, and then ask me if it’s OK to download it? Why wouldn’t I want to download it? Am I supposed to go and launch a research project into whether this new update is really a good idea? How exactly would I know that?

But wait, it gets better:

“Update has been downloaded successfully. Would you like to proceed with update?”

No, I’d like to sit here and answer more stupid questions. Why not ask if I’m having a nice day? Oh right, they probably know the answer at this point…

Next up:

“Update completed. The player will automatically turn off in 5 seconds. Please press OK.”

Now I have a question: Did anybody actually read that prior to signing off on it? It’s going to turn off “automatically” after I press a button?

Sure enough, it powers down. Now I have to turn it back on again. Grrrr.

Now I’ll be constructive. For one, I can understand giving a user control over the software version running on the device. But there should be a global setting where the user can choose to either update automatically, or under user control.

If under user control, the process should be “An update is available for your player. Would you like to update?” That’s it. One verification question. There’s no good reason to have verification for checking if an update is available, then checking if it’s OK to download the update and so on. Lastly, I don’t see why it has to “power-down.” There’s a processor running that player and all the program should have to do is “jump to 0.” That’s tech talk for “reset.” It saves the user from having to press the “ON” button again.

If the global setting is for automatic updates, then the player should go and perform the update while the unit is “OFF.” How can it do that? Well, the thing is, it’s not really “OFF” since it needs to be in some minimal operative state to get the remote “ON” command. There’s no good reason it can’t go and perform a check once a day, or once a week on it’s own and take action accordingly behind the scenes if an update is available. They could even set a notification flag so that the next time the unit is turned “ON,” I get a pop-up notification that can be dismissed with one button press.