“We want to hire the geek.” “We’re looking for people who are in touch with their inner nerd.”

By now, this is taken as gospel: HR 101 for the tech industry.  But while I’m not going to dispute the advantages of having a passion for your job, I would make the case that there’s often more involved in creating truly effective technology than software development and electrical engineering – too often, clarity and simplicity in product design (especially at the UI level) are given short shrift, even in the CE space (where one would expect to see a premium placed on such concerns).  That this somehow remains the case despite the spectacular successes of conspicuously elegant and user-friendly products such as the  iPod and google baffles me – of course I can understand how a self-reinforcing corporate ‘geek culture’ can take root at a technology company, but it’s equally clear that a lot of companies building consumer-facing products would be better served by letting a few more ‘soft science’ types into the room when defining their use cases and user interfaces.

In other words, consumer software and CE hardware firms should continue to place a premium on hiring smart people – clear-thinking, logical people – but perhaps a few less technical fetishists, at least in areas that aren’t purely technical (in other words, Toyota doesn’t have the team responsible for engineering the automatic transmission design the dashboard).

Another chronic problem is feature-bloat – solutions looking for problems that are often the result of too many developers going unchecked, all looking make their territorial mark on the product in advance of their next review (a good example of this syndrome is the ever-expanding MS Word application…)

The bottom line: engineering and design are separate (and often mutually exclusive) talents – and should be treated as such. Consumer hardware and software companies should feel as much of a responsibility to design well as to code well.

Some companies in the video over IP sector are getting it right – hulu.com and the Netflix Roku set-top box come to mind (although due an extremely limited selection of available titles, the Roku box will ultimately amount to not much more than a proof-of-concept exercise – with a core competency in DVD rental, Netflix is understandably reluctant to do much more than stick their toe in the digital delivery business for right now – but I digress…)

To put it in quasi-empirical terms – “Brian’s Theorem of Design”, if you will:

• simplicity times (power + quality) = elegance
• elegance squared = user buy-in