Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Sound, Sound, turn off the Sound!!

Attention all toy designers, manufacturers, retailers (are you listening Amazon, Walmart?), and everyone else in the toy industry: For the love of everything that is holy, please put a volume control and an on/off switch on any toy that makes any kind of sound. Whether it's motion activated, button activated, touch activated, whatever. Please, please give the parents the ability to turn it off!!! .

Let me give you a use case just to help you write the requirements (do they have product requirements in the toy industry?):

The mother is trying to put down her infant down for a nap. She is sitting in his bedroom, in a glider/rocker, with the infant in her arms. The baby is almost asleep and ready to be put in her crib. Suddenly, the infant's older sibling runs into the room, looking for his mother. A stuffed animal (the product in question) on the shelf, which has a touch-activated mooing capability, falls off the shelf as the sibling walks by and accidentally brushes by it. The fall causes the toy to start mooing loudly. The infant wakes up and starts crying, causing the mother to take the toy, and throw it out the window under the wheels of a passing car.

If the toy had an on/off switch, it would have been in off position. The fall would not have caused it to moo, the infant would have been happily asleep, and the mother would have kept her sanity.

Now really, do you want to be responsible for mothers all over America losing their sanity because you neglected to add a 50 cent feature to your product?

No comments:

Post a Comment