Also, would like to take issue with the author – are you the intended user?! Most definitely not. Therefore, without having done a study of your own of any sort, or interviews, how do you know this steering wheel isn’t ideal for a race car driver? There’s certainly plenty of justification for the design choices made. Lot of dials? Yes. Are they needed? Seems like it. Layout and colors seems messy? Don’t know – how about you get inside the cockpit of one of those things at 160mph?

Ferrari definitely studies their users and have a lot riding (no pun intended) on the success of their races.

The use of bright colors, big labels, and different knob styles actually makes sense to me as something easy to use with no eyes on it.

I have never driven one of these cars, but I can imagine the inability to release the two-handed grip to reach for something or take the eyes off the track to read a label.

So, why is this a “fail”?

When talking to some of my clients, primarily doing highly customized workflow tools, the argument against spending time or money on usability is: “there will only be 1 or 2 users of this application, and they can be expertly trained, so usability does not matter. There should be buttons for everything, and it doesn't matter how it looks – only that it does everything required, no matter how complex”.

Does anyone have any research (or anecdotes) about how these systems work out for systems with truly small user bases? This is the scenario that anyone designing this wheel would undoubtedly face – it's only got one person to please (the driver), so what argument can be made that they may not know what they're asking for?