This this this.
Trying to “guess” what makes sense and then putting it on a shipping product is madness. To put the “Users” back in UX means you need to prototype, test, and get feedback.
Finding some target users and offering them a $20 or $50 gift card for some of their time to gauge comprehension will easily put you on the right path. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in a room with a dozen smart people and we all came up with a solution that completely crapped out once it went to an actual user. The sooner you involve someone outside of the project the quicker you’ll find the right answer.
This also has to do with how you might lay out or organize the knobs/buttons themselves. Is there a functional grouping that makes sense?
My favorite example of this was when I was doing mobile keyboard design. Internal folks insisted that the “TAB” button should go on the left of the device because it is on the left side of a QWERTY keyboard. Watching users in their real day to day workflow quickly made us realize that “TAB” acted as a form-forward button and was immediately followed by pressing enter to confirm an action. So clustering them together wound up being a huge productivity boost.
