The knobs are laid out well enough to where you can easily see them and get to them. Besides some stupid user error things (people plugging in the wrong adapter), there's not much to go wrong with these things. The only real problem that ever occurs on these is that the switch will die after decades of hard abuse. I've had all kinds of different versions of these come in the shop ranging from the originals to the reissues, and they all withstood the huge amount of abuse that people run through these. The pedal has two knobs that you adjust for the volume and gain, so it's super simple to set up as well.
His go-to pedal was the fuzz face, and it's still one of the most iconic pedals out there today, complete with its unique shape and its unique sound.
He was a long time user of fuzz pedals to help boost his Marshalls into this insane overdrive that nobody else had going on at the time. Probably the most famous fuzz user out there was Jimi Hendrix.