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Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

I have no real experience designing hardware, but I do have a story about extreme waterfall in hardware design.

I was once in a meeting with some hardware people who were looking for help with the UX and complementary app for their product. They had already locked the hardware design, but had yet to decided what the buttons would actually do. Essentially, they were looking for help to come up with features for the buttons.

Thankfully I didn’t get the job.

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Sounds quite valid. Microchip have N inputs for N buttons, functions are solved in firmware, some inputs may not be used.

It's valid to decide how many buttons the user is going to need, before having any idea what the users might actually want those buttons to do?

I think it could be. E.g. when making a low-cost consumer appliance. They must have had some idea of what they were building, enough to say that the upper bound on the number of buttons they need is N. This just creates a design constraint - they now have to figure out how to do something useful and ergonomic using no more than N buttons. The exact shape, form and placement of those buttons is orthogonal to the electronics and software part, so they didn't limit themselves there.

This is unusual to my taste, but thinking about it, I half expect cheap appliance and toy vendors to work like this - decide on a microchip, and only then figure out what to do with it and how.

Looking at almost any car, even in recent years, you will see blanks for features that may or may not be present, that need buttons if they are there. They may be more obvious on some cars than others, but even luxury cars have them.

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