If you’re going to reinvent the wheel, at least make it round

21Sep07

To the movie studios who design their DVD menus with cursor icons that look like a cloud or a star or a pony;

To the software vendors who ship CDs and DVDs in a package that takes a crystal ball and utility knife to open;

To the car companies who keep creating gauges that look totally different than the ones that drivers have been relying upon all their lives;

Are these “innovations” important enough to make up for the difficulty they cause your users, when your products become that much harder to learn and use?