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Video recorders and photocopiers, even ticket machines on the railways, often seem unnecessarily difficult to use. Last December I bought myself a Video cassette recorder (36)_________as "simple to use". In the first three weeks I failed (37)_________to program the machine to record from the TV, and after months of practice I still made mistakes. I am not alone. According to a (38)_________last year by Ferguson, the British manufacturer, more than one in four VCR owners never use the timer on their machines to record a programmer: they don’’t use it because they’’ve found it far too hard to operate. So why do manufacturers keep on designing and producing VCRs that are (39)_________ to use if the problems are so obvious First, the problems we notice are not obvious to (40)_________ minded designers with years of experience and trained to understand how (41)_________work. Secondly, designers tend to add one or two features at a time to each model, (42)_________ you or I face all a machine’’s features at once. Thirdly, although finding problems in a finished product is easy, it is too late by then to do anything about the design. Finally, if manufacturers can get away with selling products that are difficult to use, it is not worth the (43)_________of any one of them to make improvements. (44) ____________________________. But that gives rise to the question, "why can’’t you have features that are easy to use" The answer is you can. (45) ____________________________. For a start, designers should build an original model of the machine and try it out on typical members of the public — not on colleagues in the development laboratory. (46) ____________________________. In an ideal world, there would be some ways of controlling quality such as that the VCR must be redesigned repeatedly until, say, 90 percent of users can work 90 percent of the features correctly 90 percent of the time.