A situation repeated seemingly thousands of times around the world:
a bunch of clever people sitting in a room somewhere, working on product development “lets add lots more complicated features! It’s what the people want!”
Well, actually, no it isn’t.
Dismayed to find just now that the spa pool that I thought I’d turned on to heat last night is still cold. Somehow it’s been reprogrammed to stay cold because it’s Friday (“So you want me to heat up? Think again!”) And so it is 99% of the time when you have an appliance that you just want to work – you’re perfectly happy to just have the minimum number of buttons so that you can be sure it’s going to do the thing you bought it for. But no, for some reason the manufacturers insist on putting heaps of buttons on it so that if by chance you press the wrong one you’ll be stuck in a submenu and you’ll end up cold, hungry, and bored in your expensive high tech home while your superfluity of over specced gadgets just laugh at you behind your back. Grrrr. Even if they come with a brick of a users manual, that will be incomprehensible too, so it doesn’t really help. User friendliness is for amateurs it seems.
