By Bill DeRouchey in Video games — 05 Sep 2007 How easy is it to overthink a design solution? Quite easy. Slow down and think it through. Just remember ABXY. As we’ve covered before with  alarm clocks , technology found in hotel rooms is often poorly designed, likely purchased from the cheapest possible source. They buy cheap, they get cheap. For example, here is a game controller designed by LodgeNet, a company trying to keep you inside your hotel room, tethered to the entertainment system, when you should really be outside exploring the new city. Notice the cluster of four buttons on the right-hand side. They are labeled A B X Y. But which button is which? Is the Y button on the top or on the left? Is the A button on the bottom or on the right? What I find most impressive here is that the labels are almost perfectly centered between the buttons. This is not an accident. An actual person out there (I apologize if you are reading this) made a conscious decision to center those labels.…