It’s interesting to think about how things seem like a good idea until you actually have to use them in practice. Features that you don’t put in to something, ideas you don’t think quite through, things that don’t seem to matter but do.

I’ll use, as an example, the dinky little MP3 player sitting next to my computer, charging. As MP3 players go, it does everything it needs to. It plays MP3s, it can charge, and it does, in general, everything an MP3 player should.

However, it’s interesting to see the ways in which it fails. It’s never anything too big, but the small annoyances add up to an amazingly annoying experience.

For one thing, you can’t rewind past the beginning of one file to the end of another. That may not be a huge failing, except for the fact that I listen to a lot of podcasts. Podcasts are significantly longer than an average song, even a short one. If I accidently hit ‘skip forward” or “skip backward”, which I’m doing all the time thanks to another annoyance, the fact that this device doesn’t have a “lock” switch, then I have to fast forward through the song at a rate of about 1 second of “real time” for 5 seconds of “song time”. That means if I’m say, 20 minutes into the podcast and hit “skip forward”, that means I have to deal with 4 minutes of songlessness while I’m walking to get back where I was. Petty? Yes. Minor? Yes. Annoying as all fuck? Hell yes.

Then look at the iPod. I would not be at all surprised if a significant amount of time was spent at Apple headquarters debating exactly what the right speed was for fast-forwarding and rewinding. You’re never left sitting, wondering what the fuck you’re supposed to do to get something to work. It’s laid out in an intuitive fashion that your brain can immediately parse.

Creating an interface or something of the sort isn’t as tough as people love to make it out to be. If you just spend some time thinking about it, it’s not that hard to figure out how things are going to be used, and figuring out how the most people are going to like it.