Long ago when word-processors had just been invented, I could have built a tidy business helping writers across London get their work printed out. Manuals for the then ubiquitous Epson dot-matrix printers were incomprehensible to anyone but an expert.

It has been an enduring mystery to me why the Japanese, with such a wealth of design skills, seem to be so bad at presenting information, at least to Western eyes. I once thought that this was because their graphical conventions were conditioned by a script that reads vertically from right to left; but it seems that modern Japanese script reads like ours, in rows from left to right.

And it does not explain why Epson expected its early users to understand hexadecimal numbers and control codes.

You might have thought that things had got better; but, according to a new Deloitte report, more than one in two consumer-electronics devices returned to vendors are not malfunctioning - buyers simply couldn't figure out how to use them. Deloitte concluded that vendors will have to make a far great effort to improve user interfaces.

Having just bought a (Korean) LG personal video recorder in the January sales I can see what they mean. The manual is mercifully free of fractured English but you would need to have a fair understanding of what a PVR consists of to make head or tail of it.

The machine boasts a hugely complicated remote control and a tiny LCD status screen. Yet is a PVR ever used without a TV, or at least a monitor? Why not have a simple remote control and use it to navigate a comprehensive no-brainer screen interface?

Again the design is reminiscent of early printers with their tiny LCD panel controls sitting next to far more usable computer screens.

On one point I would take issue with Deloitte, who criticise manufacturers for packing more features into devices than users can cope with. Complexity is not a problem in itself: cooking in the average kitchen is far more complicated than anything a user is required to do on a computer, leave alone relatively simple consumer-electronics devices. And good design hides complexity.