“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs, New York Times, 2003
Jobs was pushing back against a shallow idea of design — the notion that a designer’s job is to hand someone a finished product and say make it pretty. True design, in his view, is not decoration applied on top of a thing. It is baked into how the thing behaves, how a person interacts with it, whether it gets out of your way or fights you every step.
Apple’s products became the textbook example: the original Macintosh replaced the command line with a visual interface a person could learn in minutes. The iPhone removed the stylus and the keyboard and trusted the user’s fingers. In both cases, the visual simplicity was the functionality — you cannot separate them.
What This Has to Do with Ham Radio
Pick up a Baofeng DM-32UV. It looks fine. Solid build, clear display, reasonable size. Four stars on looks. Then try to program a DMR contact list by hand from the front panel, navigate the menu tree to set a talkgroup, or figure out why your transmission is getting into the repeater but nobody hears you. Suddenly the one-star UI rating earns every point it lost.
The radio is not badly designed in the sense of being ugly. It is badly designed in the Jobs sense: it works poorly. The menus require a manual to navigate. The logic of how channels, zones, talkgroups, and contacts relate to each other is not surfaced to the user — it is buried. You can transmit and receive, but the interaction between you and the radio is a constant friction.
Compare that to a well-designed rig where the knobs do what you expect, the menu structure mirrors the way operators actually think, and the defaults are sane. Those radios feel like they were designed by someone who actually used them on the air.
The Ham Radio Design Problem
The industry has a habit of confusing specifications with design. A radio gets points for frequency range, output power, number of memory channels, and supported modes. These matter — but they say nothing about whether the radio is pleasant or efficient to operate.
A radio that covers 136–174 MHz and 400–480 MHz with a confusing codeplug workflow is technically capable and practically frustrating. A radio with the same specs and a logical, learnable interface is a different experience entirely — even if the RF performance is identical.
Jobs would say the second radio is better designed, full stop. The specs are the box. How it works is the design.
Applying the Standard
Next time you evaluate a piece of equipment — radio, logging software, antenna tuner — try asking the Jobs question instead of reading only the spec sheet:
- Can I figure out the basic operation without the manual?
- Does the interface reflect how I actually think about the task?
- When something goes wrong, does the device help me understand why?
- After a week of use, am I fighting it less or the same amount?
A four-star score on build and performance with a one-star UI is not a great radio. It is a capable radio that fails its operator. The DM-32UV works. But it does not work well — and that gap is exactly what Jobs was talking about.
73 de OH2DQH