If you ever want to punish a user interface designer, make sure they get to use an airline’s long-haul inflight entertainment system. It must be like hell on earth for them.

As I type this, for example, I’m looking at Thai’s award-winning Royal Silk Class on-demand entertainment system. Here are what I can only assume are the unwritten operating instructions (which are just as applicable to Virgin Atlantic or Air New Zealand, all of whom suffer from many of these same obvious gaffes).

1. Please hold the controller vertically. Except when you play games. In which case, please hold it horizontally. (At Virgin Atlantic we don’t warn you about this, but you’ll get the hang of it by yourself by dying a few times in Snake.)

2. Please use the ‘select’ button in the middle of the arrow keys to select an item on the main menu. Or touch the screen. Until you get into the ‘text news’ system, where you use the right-arrow to select things, and the select button does nothing. Or if you go into the games system, you use the small button with “select” written next to it. Don’t go touching the screen in ‘text news’ or in ‘games’ by the way, because that won’t work any more.

3. Use the ‘yellow’ button to go ‘back’. Unless you’re in the ‘text news’ system, in which case you use the left-arrow. Or in the games, in which case you need to hit the blue button, and then hit the green button to confirm, because you probably want warning that you’re leaving the games system. Don’t think you’ll get the chance to confirm if you’re in the middle of a game, though – we put the ‘confirm’ screen in front of you when you’re NOT playing one. You can leave a game quickly and easily by pressing the red button by accident.

4. The ‘select’ button in the middle of the arrow keys, or the ‘select’ button that’s actually marked ‘select’, doesn’t actually select a movie or a piece of audio to be played. For that, you need to scroll left or right to highlight a piece of media, and then scroll downwards to move the focus to a button marked “View/Play Tracks”. And then you can press the select button. Either one will do. I know there’s a button marked ‘start’, but it doesn’t do anything. Unless you’re in games mode, in which case, as you hold the control differently, you’ll find it says ‘start’ vertically, unlike the writing next to the coloured buttons which has been rotated by ninety degrees, so it won’t be obvious that it works in games mode anyway.

5. You can’t select an album to listen to. You need to select each track one at a time (on Air New Zealand), or discover that you can press ‘play’ on track one and it’ll move on to track two automatically (Thai) except you can’t program a full album into ‘My Choice’, only individual tracks.

6. You can select a track into “My Choice”, a kind of programmable tracklisting tool. No, you can’t actually deselect it, though. But then, you’ve plenty of time to waste, I’m guessing, being on this flight?

7. There are brightness buttons on both the monitor and the controller. No, that doesn’t extend to volume controls.

8. No, don’t worry, sir, everyone calls the flight attendant at least once during a flight. I know, funny, putting that button on the remote as well. Would you mind pressing the cancel button for me? Not a problem, I’m used to it.

9. Yes, I know you’ve navigated to a tantalising menu option called “Marketplace” (Thai) or “Surf the Virgin world” (Virgin) but we haven’t finished that bit yet, so we’ll just put up a page saying “Coming Soon”. Oh, and don’t worry, sir, when you fly again with us next year, it’ll still be there and we still won’t have finished it.

10. Ah, don’t worry, sir, the screen’s gone totally blank and you’ve got trad-jazz coming out of your headphones because you’ve hit the mode buton on your handset. Hit it again, and you’ll be taken to something which looks like you’ve managed to get back into the interactive service but actually you’re in the linear “multichannel” service that they get in economy, so you need to press it again, and no, we’ll not give you any feedback on the screen that this is what’s happening.

11. Yes, I know we gave you the option to choose your language when you first went into the system, but we’ll give you that option again in the SkyMap service. The one with the feature of looking at very low-quality satellite photos of major towns which don’t actually have enough resolution to even see any buildings. Yes, we thought it looked impressive until we first saw Google Maps. All those years ago.

12. Should you attempt something unfamiliar to this system, like pressing the buttons a little too quickly, you will be rewarded with an easter egg – a blank screen followed by a Linux boot-up sequence, including a nice colour picture of Tux the penguin and lots of messages about “Waiting for go.go” which sounds ominously like a Wham! song.

13. No, sir, Wham! is not available on the on-demand system – nor, indeed, many things you’ve a) heard of, or b) aren’t already sick of. Might I recommend Snow Patrol or Dido?

14. Oh, and the ‘help’ option? Yes, it’s deliberately not available for the first couple of screens. People are using a brand new system, aren’t they, so it’s better they concentrate on working out how it works, rather than us helping them.

Oh my… (grin)

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