It can be as simple or as complicated as you want to make it.

Let's see:
1) To turn on the Mediastation I press "run" and it powers up. I can now play a GM piano sound on the keys.

2) To play the arranger I select styles from either the touchscreen or the "styles" button on the panel. Then I select my desired category, and style and that's it.
Push "play" or "syncro start" and begin playing.

Sound simple enough?

Of course if you want to do more things you add other small steps, such as

3) to play the extraodinary NI's B4 you must press the "organ" button. It is then ready to play with all controls accessable from the Mediastation panel and screen.

or

4) to play a Giga sound from the Linux Sampler you must press the "sampler" button and immediately the Piano you have in your first slot loads, with just one button.

How could it be easier?

Here are a few more:

5) to play a Midifile you press "player" and use the browser to select which midifile you want and press "enter". Then "play"

6) to play an audio wave or mp3 you press "player" and use the browser to select which file you want and press "enter". Then "play"

How about a really complicated one? let's say you have loaded a mp3 as in the example(6) above. And now you want to engage this powerful timestretching, pitchshifting audio editing engine called Elastique. How many steps do you think this might take?

Two, you press BPM (beats per minute) then turn the data or tempo knob to speed or slow the playback. That's it!

To change the pitch you press Transpose up or down.

As you can see basic functions are really easy to use. Now if you want to get very Complicated, you can, with the Mediastation you can call up a "protools like" DAW named " Audacity," an extensive audio editor named "Rezound," a midi sequencer named "Rosegarden", rip and burn CD's and DVD's, edit video, download files from the intenet, etc....

If you go slow the Mediastation is very, very simple to use for the basic functions, but the beauty is you do not have to stop there. When you are ready for more, the Mediastation is too!

Hope this answers you question

Richard