I have a bias toward designing user interfaces with simple composable mechanisms (that are easy to understand and compose), rather than single-purpose actions.

I have a bias toward designing user interfaces with simple composable mechanisms (that are easy to understand and compose), rather than single-purpose actions. Yes, sometimes the action is really frequent or it's part of the main workflow, and having a shortcut for it is good, but I think one often ends up with a more resilient tool by allowing the user more control so they can recover from mistakes and exceptional cases you didn't think of. A recent example is an app I'm working on that involves helping the user work through a list (they do a task for each item, then move to the next one, and so on). It's a high priority for the user to get through the whole list efficiently, so the PM wanted us to have only a "next" button because showing other buttons "might be confusing." The thinking was that it would streamline the workflow if the UI is minimal: do the task, click "next", do the task, click "next", etc. This is the kind of situation where I really want to give the user more control — if we provide "next" and "previous" buttons, they can go back if they made a mistake, or check one of the earlier items and then return to what they were doing, look ahead to see what's coming up and plan for it, etc.