Saturday, October 31, 2020

When cool beats useful, the NETGEAR N300 WNR2000v5 router

You'd think after all these years of studies on design for usability companies would have learned something. Netgear has not. Here is their NETGEAR N300 WNR2000v5 router.

The electronics work decently (I have to do a reset every two days or so), but why have they hidden the WPS button in plain site? If you do not do network setups as your job then you do it at most once a year. So the icons mean nothing. And WPS is meant to make things easy for ordinary users.

Where on earth is the WPS button which would allow me to connect simply and quickly to a wi-fi booster? I've already given you a clue by showing you only 1 of the 6 sides...there are other buttons hidden and unlabeled on the other sides of the device.

It is the triangle next to the padlock. And here you can see where "cool" beats useful. The designer wanted to be "cool" so the icon is tiny and non standard. The buttons, instead of being round are "coolly" triangular and look like LEDs. The icon is actually only 3mm wide, so anybody with vision problems is not going to be able to see it clearly.

The "cool" designer needs to go back to school and learn about usability. Oddly enough an earlier design (2017?) was much clearer:


The button is round, there is the icon (useful if you know what it means, and not the standard for WPS) but there is the acronym WPS in clear lettering underneath it.