My mom asked me to help with the camera on her new cell phone, and I figured it would be fairly straightforward. Well, I was partially right. Taking a picture was simple enough. But viewing the pictures you’ve already taken was baffling, and I couldn’t figure out what the option was called.

After some trial-and-error, I determined that you had to choose Options, and then select “Go to Graphics”. This is a terrible choice of words, since the term “graphics” doesn’t appear anywhere else in the camera menus. Let’s see if we can do better:

– View pictures
– See pictures I’ve taken
– Picture library
– Past pictures
– Picture browser

In less than a minute, I came up with five passable names that are vastly more intuitive than what the designers of that cell phone interface could do. Are those people dumb? Hardly. But it’s clear they didn’t care enough to check if what they’re doing makes sense to regular people. And if someone who works with software all the time can’t figure it out, it’s almost certainly going to baffle regular users outside the tech world.