My heat pump wasn't doing the one thing I wanted it to do.

Warm my room.

The problem was the remote. It had too many buttons and functions competing for my attention and it was stuck in some obscure mode, creating the illusion that the machine had failed.

And it made me feel stupid.

It's not that I am stupid. Nor do I lack technical ability. I used to keep corporate computer networks running.

It's that I want to do "the thing", and I expect the tool in front of me to help me do that thing, then disappear.

I don't have this problem with my car.

My car is far more complicated than my heat pump. Yet we can easily hop from one car to the next and drive it within a minute.

We don't think of a car steering wheel as an "interface". It simply does its job while hiding an extraordinary amount of mechanical complexity.

Companies lose sight of the main thing.

Engineering wants features.

Marketing wants differentiation.

Finance wants lower costs.

In that fight, the main thing often gets lost.

Someone has to say, "Make sure the heating always works."

Otherwise the user risks not being able to do "the thing".

And if they can't do the thing, the other features don't matter.