Stressful, because it wasn’t always easy to stay a step ahead of my students. They were half my age and already as conversant with technology as you are with breathing.

So I tried to focus on the things I’ve learned in my 25 years writing about tech. One of them: good interface design.

It’s darned hard. Your inclination is to stuff a lot of features into your product — “hey, that’ll make it sell, right?” And yet every feature has to go somewhere. It has to fit on some screen, in some menu, under some keystroke. So the more you stuff in, the more difficult to use your product becomes, and the less pleasure it will bring your customers.

I had recently bought my daughter a $9 digital watch from Wal-Mart. It had three buttons. You were supposed to be able to perform all of the watch’s functions using only these three buttons: set the time, set an alarm, turn the alarm on and off, start and stop the stopwatch, record lap times, and so on.

It was, as you can guess, a disastrous user interface. Every button wound up performing multiple functions. Double-press. Press-and-hold. Press two at once. There’s no possible way you could master it without the 3-by-3 inch sheet of instructions in 2-point type.

Source: New York Times (blog)