On my morning walk today, I was listening to one of Tim Harford 's Cautionary Tales podcasts. In it, he mentioned the importance of design and referred in passing to one of my heroes, Don Norman. In his book, The Design of Everyday Things , Norman pointed out many examples of objects where the designer has gone for elegance at the expense of usability. A simple example he gave was the controls for a cooker hob. Take the example below (images from Unsplash): Which of the burners does the control with the arrow correspond to? It's obvious, isn't it? Because the designer thought about usability.  Now look at this hob: Again, which ring is the control responsible for? This time we can only be sure by looking for some kind of caption to the controls, because the design totally ignores the functionality, preferring to provide a neat line of parallel knobs, building in no information.  Many years ago, when I worked at British Airways, I did a non-scientific study on another examp...