Maybe it's time we stop catering to the users inabilities,and start making software interfaces that make sense, and expect the users to adapt if they wish to benefit. That was the expectation when I started using computers, and it was reasonable. It not only made me faster, better, stronger, it also meant that after passing a certain threshold, back then, I "got it", I didn't just get that one piece of software, I had some intuition, an instinct, about how "everything" worked.. That made all software immensely more useful to me.
That instinct is getting less useful as every application tries hard to abandon basic concepts in favor of being intuitive, it may lower the bar somewhat (I don't believe that), but it definitely makes applications harder to actually use for people who used to "get it".
I believe that the Rich Hickey’s mantra “simple is better than easy” applies very well to UIs.
A lot of the times UIs try to hide complexity by making it “easy” to do common tasks, but the underlying complexity is still there and rears its ugly head when you inevitably bump into an edge case, then you have to learn all that complexity (or as is often the case - rage quit).
A good example is Amazon software in general - from their shopping software to AWS console - all great if you’ve done it before and follow their guided path, but if you want to understand what will _actually_ happen or to do a specific edge case well then you better have a lot of nerves and patience.
Seen a person actually brought to tears by a shopping experience were she fell outside of a happy one click sale path and had to do some amendments, with some significant money on the line. She just felt powerless because suddenly an “easy” experience turned bad and now she had to understand _all_ the minutia around sellers, shipping and refund policies.
Not a pretty sight.
Had the underlying principles been a little less convoluted, and actually exposed, then a user could successfully navigate even some edge cases as then he would have at least some tools at his deposal.
Right now UIs tend to drift to “click and pray” category, where you identify what’s the several common scenarios and just cover those.
The happy path is one solution in a labirynth. Once you’re off the happy path you are navigating a labirynth in the dark. It is a very frustrating experience. It would be useful to have a process map similar to the site maps of the internet 2.0 times.
Strongly, 100% agreed. Especially that "catering to users inabilities" leads to dumbed down software sucking out oxygen from any problem space, leading to frustration and inefficiency for those users who have jobs to do in it. This is becoming more of a problem now that a lot of software is collaborative in nature, meaning you're stuck with whatever your team or company uses.
The way I see it, we suffer from a bad case of "worse is better" here. The amount of utility a piece of software provides can be to first order expressed as (Number of users * Average productivity * Average result of the results of using the software). Unfortunately, the revenue of a typical SaaS vendor is proportional only to the number of users. Dumbing down the interface and trimming features increases the number of users, but kills the right part of productivity and result utility distributions. In other words: more people doing less with worse tools.
In the old days it would just be 2 separate applications. Unfortunately, with so much work being done with SaaS that suck in collaborative features (that should ideally be handled on a different layer, outside of the software), it has to be one app, so I guess it should be done in 2 tiers to be useful.
That instinct is getting less useful as every application tries hard to abandon basic concepts in favor of being intuitive, it may lower the bar somewhat (I don't believe that), but it definitely makes applications harder to actually use for people who used to "get it".