Half of today’s gadgets are returned to stores, not because they’re defected, but that they’re too complicated to use, reported by The Christian Science Monitor, gleaned from The Morning News.

…top-of-the-line Sony products often have simpler controls than its less expensive models, say Aaron Oppenheimer, who studies consumer responses to products for Design Continuum, a product design consultancy in West Newton, Mass.

Manufacturers need to show “self-control” when designing products, he says. And engineers are not always to blame: Sales people urge designers to “put a lot of buttons on this thing” so they have a lot of features to talk about with customers…

We, with our two products, can relate to these manufacturers. Different customers need different things, naturally, and we get feature requests all the time, and it’s very hard not to want to make your customers happy. But for every feature we add, it affects some other part of the product in ways more significant than you would imagine, and then it would affect your interface - usually making it a little more complicated. It’s no trivial matter, and it needs more than just self-control, but some very clear thinking, opinions, and courage. Every change to your product will get some kind of reaction from your customers, and most of us do not want to upset them. And I think it’s really hard to keep a straight head when people around you are telling you to do things otherwise. We’re all very good at making sense of things after the fact - reporters all praise the simplicity and genius of iPods now, but when iPods just came out, most didn’t think the clunky white gadget with a funny circle on it would sell.

I refuse to think that it is the designer’s goal to create an interface that would confuse the customers. We were designing Harvest’s interface up till the last minute of its release, and we’re still tweaking it. Us humans are animals of habits, and we are very good at getting used to things - which is kind of annoying when designing interface, because we get so used to whatever we designed that we think it’s intuitive and simple. Then again, our ability to adapt to things is an important factor to consider when designing interface, because people will end up using your product more than just once (if they don’t return it first), and over time, the interface might become natural to use - as opposed to intuitive at first glance. An example I can think of right now is the “lock” feature on my Nokia phone. To lock my keypads I need to press the upper left button and the “*” button at the bottom. I thought it ridiculous at first but quickly got used to this handy feature. If the designer was keen on making the interface most easy and intuitive, he could’ve put an extra button on the phone, which is probably not so bad, but you’d end up with one extra button, and a more cluttered interface.

We don’t have any mantra or tricks at the studio to create a good interface design. Maybe some people don’t even think our design is any good. But we try - and our method is to just keep working on it. It helps to have someone working with you who see things differently from you, and it helps a lot to put aside the design for a few days and look at it again with a fresh mind. I’m not a big fan of user-testing, because customer feedback isn’t necessarily right or helpful, and fortunately, we don’t have sales people here to influence our designs. So what we have is our instincts, and we have to guess a lot. There you have it.