An Excerpt from the article “Great Design: What is Design?” by Joel Spolsky; or as I like to call it “The Mute Button”.
“How could a mute button on a sound system hurt?” After all, if you don't want to waste time learning about the mute button, you can just ignore it completely, right?
No. Because at some point, someone will hit it by mistake, and no sound will come out of the speakers, and if they don't know about “mute,” they'll start trying to turn up the volume knob all the way, so when they do finally unmute the thing, the speakers will blow out with an ear-shattering boom that creates permanent, concave warps in each of the walls of the room where the sound system was installed (and a matching hump in the floor of the apartment upstairs).
And since the mute button takes up space on the control panel, now all the other control panel buttons have to be a bit smaller, making them harder to read, and there are more buttons, so the whole interface looks scarier. I swear, it's gotten to the point where I don't dare try to use the clock radio in a hotel room to wake me up. With all the options they have I can never quite tell if I'm setting the alarm clock to wake me up in time for my Very Important Meeting, or programming the damn thing to download the latest news from Mongolia on the half-hour.
This hit me just right today. I broke out laughing at work =)