Conclusion
How to interface the products

The saying "it's complicated to make it simple" applies particularly well to interfacing work. It's less surprising that many products are criticized for their abstruse user interface. There was a time when it was thought that the problem of interfaces could be solved by publishing standards that all designers would simply have to follow. Those days are gone, for a number of reasons:

• technological developments in information presentation are rapidly rendering standardized solutions obsolete;

• any new standard takes a long time to be adopted;

• standardized interfaces don't always keep up with the new functions that appear regularly.

Interfacing has thus become one of the R&D (research and development) areas of product design. Starting from...