Last weekend I played my first gig with my new band, Lipstick Driver. It’s a three-piece power-trio, in which I play electric guitar, so I’d spent the last month assembling a new pedalboard.

That’s the board, above! Over the last few weeks, I’ve spent hours and hours fiddling with those pedals, tweaking and experimenting to get precisely the range of sounds I need for this band.

While doing so, I was reminded of a conversation I had years ago with Bill Buxton about guitar pedals and industrial design.

Buxton is a long-time user-interface expert at Microsoft research, and he also studied music back in the 70s. When we spoke, he told me how deeply he admires the interface design of musical equipment like guitar pedals.

Their specs, he noted, are incredibly robust — yet they’re also effortlessly easy to use. Guitar pedals are miracles of user-friendly architecture.

“There’s ‘normal’ spec, there’s ‘military’ spec, and there’s ‘rock and roll’ spec,” he said. “Rock and roll spec has the highest tolerance! It has to withstand the road, and its ability to deal with human gestures is way beyond anything we’ve done even with computers.”

This bang on. Indeed, after working with guitar pedals for decades, I’ve realized that the world of design could learn a lot by observing what’s so good about these amazing pieces of machinery.

So forthwith, here are my 5 Design Lessons From Guitar Pedals:

1) When tech is rugged, it’s a joy to use

Guitar pedals are incredibly rugged.

Their casings are often solid metal, and their knobs and dials can handle huge amounts of abuse. Their components are usually so well-soldered that you can accidentally drop or tumble a guitar pedal from quite a height, and it’ll be fine.

This makes sense, right? Guitar pedals are, after all, a technology that you are supposed to step on. And not in some gentle, delicate manner! No, when you’re performing live, you’re often lunging over and mashing on the thing with your foot. They’re called “stompboxes” for a reason.

And this is part of what makes them so joyfully usable. There’s something existentially thrilling about using a piece of electronics that you’re not worried about breaking. In a world where our digital gear has become increasingly delicate and thin — and increasingly crafted from glass, for god’s sake — a guitar pedal’s ruggedness makes you bold. You want to use it, enthusiastically and aggressively and often.

More tech should be that tough.

2) UI shouldn’t focus only on your hands. Use the rest of your body too

When you’re playing a guitar, your hands are occupied. So guitar pedals are designed to let you use your feet to manipulate electronics.

This is incredibly weird, when you think about it, right? In almost every other case, everyday electronic and digital technology utterly ignores most of our bodies. Our computers and phones and appliances are generally all designed to be controlled just with our hands, and very occasionally with our voices.

With the exception of the occasional edge-case (like footpedals used by transcribers, some driving-game controllers, and certain Vim enthusiasts), the creators of our digital tech basically assume our bodies don’t exist beyond our hands and heads.

I think that’s a mistake. Guitar pedals show that you can issue surprisingly complex commands with your feet. Obviously you step on a pedal to turn it on and off — but you also do other often-nuanced moves, like tapping a tempo into a delay pedal.

Tech design should consider using more of our bodies. There’s a bit more of this happening — in VR rigs, for example — but not much.

3) The best UIs have simple, bold visual cues

When you play guitar live, it’s often in weird and awkward environments. Sometimes you’re playing in near darkness (if the club is moody and black), and sometimes in blinding light (as with outdoor gigs in the sun, or on stages piercingly well-lit).

Given the wild range of lighting, pedals need to be designed for absolute clarity about what’s going on with them. And the best pedals tend to be! They’ve got bright LEDs that show whether the pedal is turned on or not; and if the pedal’s effect is rhythmic, the LEDs usually pulse in time, making it easy to see if the tempo needs adjusting. Meanwhile, a pedal’s knobs are usually marked very clearly so you can see where they’re pointing.

In essence, a good pedal conveys its state with a quick glance. It is thus a form of “calm technology”, as Marc Weiser and John Seely Brown once described it — a tech that can be assessed by merely peeking at it, out of the corner of your eye. Some pedals have more-complex forms of info that they display on little screens you need to squint at, but typically that’s rare.

Again, this is deeply refreshing in today’s digital landscape, where you’re often working with software interfaces that have squintily tiny readouts, or byzantine layers of hidden information.

Guitar pedals show the value of clear, bold UI.

4) Physical UIs can be more intuitive and usable than screens

Knobs and physical buttons are vanishing from the world of industrial design. The dashboards of modern cars are increasingly turning into flatscreens with virtual buttons. Kitchen appliances are moving the same way.

Personally, I dislike this trend. When I’m driving, I do not want to have to glance at a screen to figure out how to turn down the damn air conditioning. No, I want to reach out and — relying only on muscle memory, and without taking my eyes off the road — rotate a knob devoted solely and only to controlling the temperature. Virtual screens require you to peer at them, and when I am busy with a complex task (like, say, not killing people, which is one’s primary task when driving a car), I don’t want to fiddle with screens.

Guitar pedals magnificently resist this trend. They flaunt the absolutely superior ergonomics of physical knobs and flicky switches and buttons. Not only is everything physical on a good guitar pedal, but the knobs are often very chunky, with rubbery contours and ridges so they’re easy to grab and turn to precisely where you want.

In world that’s turning into a stream of bits, guitar pedals are a reminder of the value in keeping things physical.

5) Don’t just make it functional. Make it beautiful too

Guitar pedals are aesthetically gorgeous.

Even when they’re graphically unadorned, their sheer physical profile — with cool knobs, bright LEDs, and colorful casings — make them intriguing objects. Increasingly these days, though, pedalmakers go ever further with aesthetics, by illustrating the casings with fabulous graphic art. I’m a fan of the style: They’re usually in the Venn overlap between groovy album-art of the 70s and modern skateboard graphic illustration.

And again, they’re putting all this graphic energy into something that you step on. Crazy, right?

But it’s a reminder that industrial design ought to aim not merely for parsimonious elegance but flat-out artistic beauty.

(If you dug this listicle, head on over to the “clap” button, and — much like a guitarist engaging a ferocious fuzz pedal — slam down on it. As with a guitar pedal, the clap button is designed for multiple use; up to 50 claps per reader, in fact!)

Clive Thompson publishes on Medium three times a week; follow him here to get each post in your email — and if you’re not a Medium member, you can join here!

Clive is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.