your product is not a product

Or if it is, well, you failed. Does your mother call you her "product"? No, so if your company produces copying machines, be proud of it, and call your product a copying machine. Your product does more than that? Great, then find a new name, call it by the model name, whatever. But don't call it a "product" to the eyes of your customers.

Below is a photo of the home screen of the copier I used at my former job.

Let's have a look at some of the words here: "service... WorkCentre 7335... this product enables... proceeding... various operations that may include sending emails and faxes... under an electronic form... depending... installed services... chosen button... select a service."
    What. A. Mess. To me it looks more like some unknown alien artifact than a copier.

    Use case: Zbigniew the contract manager wants to copy this damn contract he finalized after dozens of phone calls, hours of meetings and mountains of emails. He should have a giant face on his smile when the copier welcomes him warmly to this easy task. Instead,
    • The copier blathers weird words totally irrelevant to the action of copying/scanning a document: "Select... service... product enables... various operations... under an electronic form... button to select a service".
    • Then, this stupid machine isn't even conscious of its capabilities. Heck, it even uses conditional sentences: "This product enables [...] operations that may include [...], depending on the installed services."
    • M. copier gives its name. How charming. A good beginning to fire a human relationship, but hey, you're a machine.
    • To do the damn copy, Zbigniew has to click a smallish icon, whereas there there are lots of unused space right below
    What if we made Zbigniew happy?

    In addition to fixing the points listed above,
    • The name of the printer (possibly more, like IP address, SMTP server, and troubleshooting stuff for sysadmin) could be displayed when "Technical information" is pressed. Normal users don't need this information displayed all the time.
    • The blue space could be used for subtle branding (a logo would look nice in a grayer shade of blue)
    Additional requirements? Yes, nothing comes for free (for more on this, see the fabulous blog of Wil Shipley):
    • Need to adapt the layout and the size of the buttons to the number of services available.
    • (Possible) need to develop the additional "Technical info." screen. Possible because maybe displaying the printers name wasn't necessary in the first place, let alone a full diagnosis/troubleshooting screen.
    • And (the most complicated in my experience) need to fight to prevent clutter from creeping back. The various people involved in the design of the screen fear change, often to the point that they will promote status quo and will have to be convinced these changes benefit Zbigniew.
    And that's what I fight for. A humble task, if you ask me.