Have faith. You didn’t always know how to drive a car.
Even with the best-designed devices, there’s that involuntary crisis of confidence upon first introduction. Despite all the good things you’ve heard about the Acme z500, it just looks …. well … daunting. Too many buttons and wires and adjustments. Too many instructions with too many exceptions. It’s right at that moment that you need to repeat this mantra (silently if you want to appear cool): “I learned to drive a car. I learned to drive a car. I learned to drive a car.”. The point is that unfamiliar devices will become familiar with use. When you first looked at the dashboard of a car or the panel of your microwave or the front of your stereo, it looked formless and cluttered. With time, and not much time at that, it took on shape and organization. With time and use, what looked random and undifferentiated morphed into a distinctive landscape with various regions associated with particular functions.

Self-esteem. The designer is the dummy, not you.
Of course, another possible reason why the Ajax P32 looks cluttered and amorphous is that it is cluttered and amorphous. That branch of product design known as Human Factors may be completely unknown to the zealous techies back at the Ajax skunkworks. It’s remarkable how often products come to market – products that people like you are meant to master and depend on – without any sign that the designers thought about you and where you live and what your life is like. So, when the P32 is hard to learn and out of synch with other technology you’ve been using for years and completely opposie to your intutions about how it should work, you are not to blame.

Chose Wisely. Be a choosy demanding consumer.
More important than not letting the Ajax P32 get you down is not buying it in the first place. Keeping in mind lesson 1 (few useful products will be instantaly learnable), try before you buy. The Aardvark Zeppo may be a much better choice for you, and not just because it comes earlier in the alphabet. If it looks clearer, simpler, better made, more like things you already use, it’s probably a better choice. If you can try out more than one competing product (if in fact there’s more than one on the market), your hands and eyes and instincts may give you a strong sense of what to buy.

KISS. Keep it simple, stupid.
This ancient principle – older than the Ten Commandments, which is lucky since otherwise there might have been 39 – remains valid. Don’t buy features you won’t need. Features may be wonderfully powerful and worth extra cost. But beyond the extra dollars, they make a product unavoidably more complex. You are much less likely to master features that you don’t use often. How many people know what all the buttons are for on their VCR? Play. Stop, Rewind: of course. And that’s because they become “automatized”. This is a word that you can use to dazzle your friends at parties, despite that fact that it just means that you can use these features without thinking about it.

The Trojan Horse. Watch out for false simplicity and hidden complexity.
The sales rep from Apex is pushing his MegaSimple model. If his handlebar mustache didn’t tip you off, you should have been suspicious when you noticed that this product has only two buttons. “What could be simpler?!” he asks, rhetorically of course. Being an empowered consumer (having learned rule 3), you ask for a demonstration. He hesitates. You insist. And then the MegaSimple starts to show its true colors. If it needs to work in six different modes, and each has several stages, then trying to make all that happen with only two controls can be a whole lot more complicated than than it would be with six controls, one for each mode. The point is that functional simplicity may not translate into visual simplicity. Investing the learning and the reach needed for more buttons may buy you operation that is far more easily … automatized.

Setup. You need to set the table before you can eat.
Murphy’s Law has a several corolaries that can be applied to a home health device. If orange juice can be spilled on it, it will be spilled on it. If the cat can land on it and knock it off the night stand, that cat will. And so on and so on. The point is that making a product work well for you requires that you put some thought into placing it and setting it up securely. No device has limitless capacity to absorb punishment; so protect your new Able-Life model 3 and think carefully about the space around it and what else is likely to go on in that space. If you are setting up technology in a familiar place, this shouldn’t be too hard.