A good article about usability and how important it is to overall system satisfaction and performance.

As a consumer, I know this lesson first hand: try as I might to make my HTPC easy to use, guests find it totally incomprehensible and I have lost a lot of hair trying to keep it working.

From personal experience I can say that user interface development is under-appreciated by developers. Most engineers are the guys that enjoy figuring out that 269-button remote - they are the problem because they dont see the problem.

Which is why companies that DO see the problem and design usable product, like Apple and Tivo, do so well. It is surprisingly hard to make something easy to use and you often have to make tough decisions to leave features out because they compromise ease of use, ie you cannot please everyone all the time.

Must Consumer Electronics Be So Complicated?

If only home-entertainment products could be as simple as...computers

By NICK WINGFIELD

Wall Street Journal

November 27, 2006

What's more, companies with Silicon Valley pedigrees have begun to apply those lessons to the electronics business, making highly usable products that have made great technical leaps over consumer gadgets like the VCR and Walkman, with machines like TiVo Inc.'s digital video recorder and Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod.

"If we assume picture quality is great and assume audio quality is great, the real challenge now is making it usable," says Jeff Goldstein, vice president of marketing for home audio and video for Sony's U.S. electronics division.

One tool that has long attempted to do just that, but still needs a little work, is the remote control. Much of the remote's usefulness has been lost, experts say, with the continuous addition of more buttons. Mr. Nielsen, the user-interface expert, once totaled up the buttons on the six remotes in his living room -- for a cable set-top box, digital video recorder, DVD player, TV, stereo receiver and VCR -- and came up with 239. He uses perhaps a third of them.

Button overkill violates a basic principle of usability, Mr. Nielsen says, which is that a device should at first present users with a limited number of features likely to be most useful, then allow users access to more advanced functions if they wish. On most conventional remotes these days, electronics companies attempt to show users every last thing their gadgets can do all at once. "They want to expose all their features," Mr. Nielsen says.

update: 11-28-06

While I dont agree with his solution completely, Joel has the same sort of complexity-criticism of Vista.