The User Interface of the Violin

Earlier today, I met a friend for breakfast who’s an outstanding professional UX designer. I was curious about something:

“How do you balance the need to give people a user interface they’re familiar with and can do something with right away, against the opportunity to innovate and do new things that may take more time to learn?”

He gave a beautiful analogy in response.

“Consider the violin. It has one of the most difficult user interfaces in the world to use. But if you’re willing to put in the thousands of hours of practice, you can make such beautiful music with it. There has to be that trade off. If we demand of our users a steep learning curve, they had better be able to produce some beautiful music.”

I like that idea because I’ve met many designers who get so mesmerized by the idea of doing something new and amazing that they lose sight of the fact that “the tradeoff” has to make sense.