The Shaw Gateway Six Months On

We have had the gateway and three portals for about six months now. My first impressions of it’s-just-okay have not changed for the most part, but there are a few things I love and a similar number I hate.

Things I Love

Let’s start off with the good.

• The multi-room PVR is huge. No more contention to watch recorded shows. Starting a show in the theatre then taking it into bed is great.
• There is only been one time where six tuners was not enough. It was a rare occurrence where there were several shows with weird start and stop times and the software was too stupid to make some common sense decisions about dealing with the conflicts in the guide.
• Speedy (relatively) video on demand (VOD) interface. We watch way more VOD now (mostly no extra cost) as it is no longer a painful experience.

Things I Hate

It would be great to have a product that just impresses you; the Shaw Gateway system is not quite there yet.

• Network instability; at least that is what I assume what it is. Far too often the picture freezes. It is most common when you are changing something like switching from a recording to live TV or skipping ahead on a show. It just gets stuck. There is still the occasional “Cannot find the gateway” message, but they have become less frequent.
• The user interface was designed by a team of (poorly) trained monkeys attempting to copy someone else’s UI. The time-delay-action drives everyone nuts. Unclear and inconsistent menus are a constant source of error and frustration. Who’s brilliant idea was a remote with no EXIT button? There are so many issues, I will list them below.
• In the summer, Shaw was talking about feature updates in fall 2011; so far, nothing. There have been two software upgrades, but they have only fixed bugs or corrected minor feature issues.

Why The User Interface Is So Bad

There are plenty of examples of good and bad media device interfaces out there. You would think Shaw/Arris could come out of the gate with something much better than what we have today.

• You must wait for things to happen. The horizontal scrolling menu waits for you to land on an option for a short period of time before you are able to see the options. For example, if I want to see the channel list I need to land on the channel list option and wait. After what seems like an eternity (from a UI perspective) you see the channel list. This waiting theme is used all over the UI. It is really confusing when you are learning how to use the device and really annoying once you know.
• Inconsistent menu operation. When you get into a submenu you are treated to a confusing array of options to select from. Some of the options are actions (they do things) and some are parameters (they change the behaviour of actions). Some have obvious side effects and others, not-so-much. I have included some examples below.
• Round lists. I am a big fan of the round list. Who wants to get to the end of a long channel list only to find they must return from where they came. The problem with these round lists is that I can never seem to tell where I am or where am I going. Some start in the middle and some at the top of the screen. Sometimes a thin yellow line tells me where the top and bottom meet. Sometimes there is a menu block with more options breaking up the top and bottom. Which way is up and which way is down; I can never seem to tell without looking at individual list items. What order (if any) are the items in and why can I not change the order? Why does Blackhawks at Canucks come after Luck; everything else seems to be alphabetical.
• It looks like a child scribbled it. I mean; really? See the Sony PS3 if you are interested in what elegant looks like.

[Update 2012-04-26]
I just discovered another annoying UI glitch. I assume it is a bug; if not it is at least an inconsistency between the portal and the gateway. There is a menu option to delete all episodes from the same program at one time, but it only works if there are 35 episodes or less. If you have 36 or more episodes and select delete all you will get a server error 3308. The only work around I could find was to delete enough episodes individually to get down to 35 or less before selecting delete all.

Menus That Make Life Difficult

A big part of the UI problems can be found in how the menus are designed. I use the term “designed” loosely as in many cases it is unclear that any thought was given to the consequences of the menu operation.

• You must wait for things to happen. Okay, I already mentioned this, but it is much worse than it seems. If you try and stop a recording or delete a program the UI appears to accept your request without a problem, then after a few moments you get the are-you-sure menu. What is worse is that when you confirm the operation it appears to accept your selection, but nothing has really happened. The UI returns to normal operation, but the action did not complete. As a result you can select options in the menu that no longer make sense.
  
  I often record a hockey game to skip through the commercials. I cannot be sure when it will end, so I add extra time to the recording settings. If the game ends on time, when I finish watching the recording is still going on, so I choose the option to stop recording and confirm it. Then I return to the menu for the program in order to delete it, but I still have the stop recording option showing. I know I stopped the recording, but the gateway seems to be working on things in the background and the menu is not updated.
  
  Delete has a similar problem. The worst issue as a result of this is when you want to delete more than one program at a time. We may have saved three episodes of Breaking Bad until everyone has watched them. When the watching is done I want to delete the old programs. However, if I select one of the episodes to delete and confirm it, nothing happens right away. I return to the menu immediately, but if I try to delete a different episode I will eventually get the message episode does not exist. After the background stuff finishes everything works fine, but you must sit there and wait for the delay to pass.
• What does close mean? Most of the meaty activity in the UI happens in the little vertical menus that pop up for many things. If you press info on a program you will get a little menu that gives you some options for what you can do to or with the program. Unfortunately the behaviour on these menus is very inconsistent.
  
  On the info menu for a program, there is typically an option to record once or record series. Each of these options behave differently if you press the right arrow button or the okay button. Press okay and it immediately sets a recording with the default options. Press right arrow and you get to see the list of options and have a chance to change them first. That seems to make sense, however, as soon as you get used to the right arrow digging you deeper into the menu you discover that most of the time you press it you will exit from the menu completely. If you are in the middle of changing the parameters for a recording, your changes will be lost without warning.
  
  There are other annoying things about these little menus. In some cases, items on these menus are actions that cause things to happen and others are parameters that you can change. Unfortunately there is no way to tell the difference unless you have already trained yourself in advance. It took me far to long to discover that when you drill into the record once menu in order to change the parameters, you must select record once again in order to actually set the recording. Most of the items on this menu are parameters, but there is another action item: close. As you might guess, close will cause exit out of whatever little menus you have drilled into. The only side effect will be that you loose everything you had changed up to that point. If, on the other hand, you go to a scheduled recording to make a change and close will not cancel your changes, it will confirm them. In fact, any key I use to get me out of that menu will confirm my changes.
  
  If you bring up the info on the current live program you will get an option to close and watch (close and resume on a recorded program). I have no idea what the difference is. Both seem to do exactly the same thing. What a waste! A redundant menu option to bypass with the up/down key.
• Strange things happen. I understand that the MoCA network is running on potentially shaky cables and this may have some impacts on playback performance, but does it really need to affect the function of the UI? Very small amounts of simple data should be all that is necessary to communicate commands between the portal and the gateway. In a world where I can send commands between computers in all corners of the world it seems odd that I cannot get them over 20 metres of cable in my house. The picture below is what I saw when I tried to set a recording. It seemed to display scheduling forever, then it stopped.
  
  
  
  After a moment (the famous delay) I saw the following screen.
  
  
  
  There is no reason that the UI cannot be quickly updated according to the functions that have been executed on the gateway. These problems are so common across the system it seems as though the software architecture has been designed in many layers with only the upper layers having responsibility for providing a good user experience.

Things the Cat Loves

The cat’s opinion does not factor into too many of my purchase decisions, but if he had a vote he would say the portal is a comfortable place to sit even if it is not as hot as the old DCT.