Retarded people, participating in studies since the dawn of time.

> dumb as possible so we can raise up a new
> generation of stupider adults who can’t even get that right

What a load of trash. The system is design for real people, you know the ones out and about who can not manage to turn on subtitles. They are the ones that need to be able to set the device up.

> Anyways it is the parents fault

Right. Something is hard to set up, so it is the parents fault. Now if they were parents out in the wild they are the parents we want on side as they attempted to lock the machine down, and attempted to control what Jnr plays. 47% of them failed. If they did not attempt to set the machine up I'd agree with you.

> but the test was skewed

Without knowing the full details of the test, I can not answer that.

> and they never provided the adult with any
> documentation, or at least they haven’t said so.

They had not really said all that much in the link above. The truth is we don't know if they included the manual or not.


Best option IMO is to sell the devices locked down. If you want to play GTA you will be willing to read a small amout of the manual to do so.

Neeneko Says: Actually, you would be surprised...

Heh, I wondered if someone would say that. That has got to be a frustrating job, because some people just won't be satisfied until an interface can read your mind and program itself. And then they'd complain that they have to think.

[...] Filed under: Wii Warm Up [...]

I agree...the parents that were part of this test were just stupid and there is no real excuse for it.

On game systems it is very simple to set a rating limit...I don't know about the V chip...I think I have one on my television and that kinda makes me uneasy (I don't believe in them)

It is not hard to use the parental control features.

And they mention DVRs. What about DVDs? They are using the TV and video game rating systems. Are they afraid of the movie industry or something?

I mean, seriously, you're led by the freakin' hand (push button A to do this, push button B to do this), how the heck hard can it really be?

I seriously question the validity of this study (and if it's true that the Parents really had such difficulty, then I question the validity of the "subjects" as well).

Nightwng2000
NW2K software

Menus in TV sets are crap anyways. It took me forever to help train my parent to turn on closed captioning.

I found the Wii setup to be fairly easy, but the 360 setup was a bit more of a pain, it's menus need work.

"you kids these days with your hula-hoops and your zima and your Dan Fogelberg..."

seriously, what? you can't UNDERSTAND WORDS WHEN THEY ARE PRESENTED TO YOU?

what batch of retarded inbred blind people did they get to do this test?

Parents didn't understand it??? Then maybe, just maybe, they need to ask themselves whether they need to redo this "study" with a different group of parents. I agree the blame here lies with the parents and not the consoles. My kids PS2 kicks up the parental password everytime they put in a DVD that's questionable. I have their cable viewing set to certain restrictions and if my son wants to watch something not allowed, he has to tell me what it is and then leave the room and I'll enter the password for him to view it if it's something he can watch. What's so hard about that???

I'm not terribly surprised. I know that everyone on this site is pretty savvy when it comes to technology, and navigating a menu system is second nature to most of us. Zipping in and setting the parental controls SEEMS easy to us, but it can still be a bit confounding for the less technologically literate. I'm not making excuses for these parents - if you buy a system and set the parental controls, you have a duty to bang on it until you're sure the settings are what you want. However, the user interface for some of these consoles leaves a lot to be desired.

Regis Philbin had just learned how to learn to operate the VCR when the DVD players became popular. He can't even operate a cell phone. Parents should feel lucky.
Ben

Twenty parents? Yeah, god knows that's a statistically significant number.

I feel like there should be a requirement to at least have a significant number of people in a "study" before you go touting it to the world. "We surveyed a group of three (3) Americans and have concluded that all Americans are male, enjoy baseball, and think the Dodgers are the best team ever. -USC study)"

I love the parental settings on my Xbox360. I often use it to keep my older brother's grubby little hands off my stuff while I'm not home. Four little button presses and I'm playing my game, and nobody else can mess with it. If parents only knew about it, it works 100% of the time. ;-)

They need to put that feature in big red letters on the front of the box I guess. Maybe a lot of parents reallly don't care?

@DavCube
Is that Jonny Cage's new finisher????

@rdeegvainl

I can't imagine a UI designer thinking to himself "This could be more friendly to the novice - and it is the novice who is going to need this function - but screw it. I'm going to invert the parental control spectrum and bury it three layers down in an ancillary menu. Just to spite the user. I hate them so much..."

It doesn't really maker any difference that its the fault of the parents. The fact remains that they fond it somehow hard to set up the parental controls.

You can't realistically do anything to change the parents apart from trying to educate them. It's up to the designers to ensure that people who appear to be pretty damn stupid (at least in one fairly specific domain) are still able to operate the controls. Even if it is their fault, blaming the parents here isn't going to help anyone.

Also, I am completely against dumbing down this process. If you make it simple enough for an idiot adult to figure out, it is simple enough for a child to figure out.

When using the game console, participants were confused whether their selection represented the highest rating allowed or the lowest rating blocked (despite explanations displayed onscreen)…

So despite the screen stating exactly what they mean, the parents couldn't figure it out? I can understand if that info was buried in manuals, but ONSCREEN? I weep for America's educational system that has failed to teach reading comprehension...

> en you will get a flood of console returns because they are defective.

Depends on the message returned, but you are most likely to be correct.

> I Think that the consoles when they are fresh from the factory,
> should cue the parents to set the parental locks the moment
> they turn on the console.

A fine suggestion, I agree but "many participants believed they had successfully activated parental controls when they actually had not" makes me at least think the problem is not simply that the feature is hidden in some obscure settings menu, but that the UI for setting up the controls needs a rethink.

> Also, I am completely against dumbing down this process.
> If you make it simple enough for an idiot adult to figure out,
> it is simple enough for a child to figure out.

Simply to lock does not equate to simple to unlock. Unlocking should be as hard as the password assigned.

> So despite the screen stating exactly what they mean,
> the parents couldn’t figure it out?

We have two possible reasons to this. They did not read the text on screen. Nothing can be done for them. Such users if not in the test however would likely not even attempt to set up parent controls.
The text was confusing. If so it needs to be re-written.

@VioletSon

Actually, you would be surprised. I've had moments where, when designing a UI, the desire to make the user suffer becomes almost enough for me to actually DO it. I could easily see a designer with less self control (or more of a mean streak) figuring that into their process.

@ michael lee

"Right. Something is hard to set up, so it is the parents fault."

What makes you think it's hard to set up? All the consoles I've worked with, it's been an easy process.

"The text was confusing."

How could you possibly know this? WHY would it be? Developers actually pay people a stupid amount of money specifically to research stuff like this. Not to mention the fact that it's actually HARD to MAKE the instructions for something as simple as parental controls confusing in the first place.

This is not rocket science, people. Put in a GD password, boom. Done.

@ rdeegvainl

I'm with you, 20 people does not a legitimate study make, by any stretch of the imagination. And quite frankly, if half of their 20 parents really couldn't figure it out, I refuse to believe the sample set wasn't very deliberately skewed to include the most technophobic vegetables they could find.

Parental Controls are a nice feature, but are useless when the parents do not utilize them or do not understand them.

Memo to those with a game-legislating agenda:
This study used 20 parents. Not a representation of American parents.

One of them was a midget?

Sorry, I watched Knocked Up 3 times over the weekend.

Using just the parental control features with out basic knowledge of the prevailing rating system is of course going to be confusing. There needed to be another group of 20 with access to the ESRB website or another such resource.

You know, whenever I hear people talk about the fancy parental controls, and the problems associated with using them I wonder: "Whatever happened to the 'parental control' of locking the controllers in the trunk of the car you drive to work?"

try again with movies(DVDs) with a set of parents that know what menus are and how to use them.....

@ rdeegvainl

Heh heh.

No, it's the fusion of Ermac and Cage, a sacrificial finisher, lol.

You can't possibly care about your kid and not take the time to learn how to block content you deem unsuitable.

Blocking kids from any of the new-gen consoles is ridiculously easy. The one I have gives step-by-step instructions while going through the process, and has a little card (one it's impossible to miss when opening the system) explaining what the ratings mean as well. Any parent who can't figure this out can't be literate, and if they're not literate, I don't see how they have the money to buy any of these systems save through a failure in business practices (in which higher-level and managerial types have somebody else read and write for them).

Who could honestly think it's the numerous tested systems' fault that the parents can't understand something broken down for them? It seems pretty clear that consistently similar failure rates in the parental controls of all the tested items are more likely to be due to similar and common failures on the parents' part than identically ambiguous instructions on all the differing systems.

And the game systems, at least, are quite explicit in their explanations of how to apply parental settings. Many parents don't even know the game system HAS parental settings even though it says so in the quick guides, the instructions manuals, and (some of) the startup screens for the systems.

@michael lee

Are you going to blame the game systems for not telepathically PLACING the knowledge and the urge to pay attention to what they give their children and to set the ratings according to simple, easy-to-comprehend instructions? You may not have previously been aware of how truly, inanely easy parental settings are, but you've now been informed. Why should game system makers be held accountable for people being morons?

I agree with Michael Lee. Perhaps I can clarify my reasoning in particular, and that will simultaneously clarify Lee's position if his reasoning is close enough to mine.

A very important part of the design process for any well-made product (which means every next-gen console) is making sure that, once it is made, the target audience can figure out how to use it without too much effort. Gamers tend to be at least decent at using technology, so parental controls geared toward a gamer parent will lack a certain degree of usability which the company felt was unnecessary to waste resources on developing further. However, on that same token, game companies are aware that sometimes a gamer is only a child, and that the parents may very well be idiots when it comes to technology. Parental controls geared toward a technophobe will be extremely easy to use.

A parental control is, almost by definition, supposed to be geared at Everyparent. If a generic parent is unable to use it, it fails the usability test. Just for reference, my definition of an Everyparent in this case is as follows:

- doesn't read the manual
- makes no effort to be good at using technology

Granted, the sample size in this test is unfortunately minute so the results cannot say anything valuable about the general populace. Putting that aside, it is the responsibility of the company to make a product that its target audience doesn't have trouble with. The target of a Parental Control feature is the parents, so parents should be able to use it. If they can't, it is the fault of the product's designers for making a bad interface.

Of course, I am making assumptions about who their target audience is. If they assume that the people who would be using the Parental Control feature know a bit about technology, then their product might be good within those parameters. In that case, if they get the parameters wrong, then it is still the fault of the company. If a user is outside of the parameters set by the designers, it doesn't make the user stupid.

@neoelasticman

I think the biggest fault in their study is that they are trying to measure two things, and so their sample is too variable. They don't split the group into those who know what ESRB ratings mean, and those who don't.

I notice that they didn't have a group setting MPAA ratings.

Perhaps if they first split the group up into those who understood the ratings and those who didn't, then there might be a bigger difference. I mean what if the goal was to set it to block "adult" content. On a PS3, you wouldn't be able to find the "adult" rating, so you wouldn't necessarily understand how to block.

Were they told to block "M" games? Or "T" games? Or just given general instructions like "turn on parental controls". Automatically people who didn't know ESRB ratings, and what was "more mature" ratings, would fail, because they wouldn't know which was the higher rating.

Now is that the fault of the interface? Maybe. Does the PS3 show ratings explanations? If so, then maybe the parents tested never thought to click the "more info" or "help" button? Is that the interface's fault?

Seriously, the ratings are right there on the top of the machine; the systems ask on first setup whether you want to install parental controls; the language used is geared toward the literacy level (4th-grade reading level)and not at all ambiguous; and then, if you choose to install parental controls, it walks you through it with ON-SCREEN PROMPTS.

If parents can't comprehend this, then I don't see how they are competent to raise children.

Most of the people who've come to me asking how to set up parental controls had never even looked at the system, letting their kids do the setup. Many of the parents purchasing systems assumed (until I told them otherwise) that the existence of parental controls meant they didn't have to do anything upon setup, that it would miraculously filter out what they didn't want their kids doing (and most of those then asked whether the parental controls on their computer worked the same way, ugh).

Forgive me if, in the face of such evidence (every bit as conclusive as this unscientific study), I continue to assume the parents are the problem, not the parental control interfaces.

If the parents can't rea dthe goddamned screen then maybe they shouldn't be making decisions for their children at all.

[...] Global Consulting firm User Centric recently conducted a study on effectiveness of parental controls in electronic devices. 20 parents and 20 children were gathered, with the parents asked to set up parental controls and children asked to bypass them. The results will shock you. Well not really, I just wanted to feel like the nighttime news hook story commercial voice over guy. The results are pretty much what you’d expect. Confusion about ratings and how indeed to setup the controls themselves led to a 47% failure rate on video game consoles, with lesser degrees of failure for V-chips, mobile phones, and DVRs. I take two things from these results. First, parents need to better understand the ratings systems before they start trying to restrict access to them, and User Centric needs to perform another study on parents who aren’t stupid. Hit the jump for User Centric’s press release, discovered via GamePolitics. Study Finds Usability Problems with Parental Controls OAKBROOK TERRACE, IL, SEPTEMBER 25, 2007 - Ratings-based parental controls are often used to protect children from exposure to inappropriate media. To compare the usability of common parental controls, Chicago-based usability consultancy User Centric, tested four devices with 20 parents and 20 children ages 9-12. [...]