One of the ironies of software giving us so many choices is that said choices are often hard to find or figure out.

Remember when car radios had 5-6 buttons and pretty much all worked the same way. Now I have no idea how to find stations when I jump into my wife's or son's car... sometimes it isn't even obvious how to turn the darn thing off.

And don't even get me started on the poor UI of the Scientific Atlanta 8300 DVR used by Time Warner.

I use a computer all day long, day in and day out; some pretty complex CAD tools... and frankly bad User Interfaces are the bane of the human existence. I could have sworn we invented computers to make our lives easier. (of course the computer does... it is the software writer that writes the UI... )

I tend to chuckle at this as when I was going to college I was often told that software would make everything so much easier, and often I find that in consumer product design, the hardware is not the "tall pole" holding up the project. (of course one really serious issue is what we call "feature creep..." when project management adds "just one more" feature to the list that software folks have to incorporate before product delivery.)