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The user is on their own

We either expect people to be super self-sufficient, or complex things to be super easy.

The ones who pass through this gauntlet and emerge as confident experts on the other side internalize the process and end up believing it’s how things should be, many get stuck in between, forever doomed to frustration to being at the mercy of systems that are opaque and hostile to them, and some are excluded entirely, by lack of support and resources, accessibility problems, financial barriers since courses are expensive, etc. I don’t have an clear actionable answer to these issues and this piece is more of a rant than anything else but I do think it’s useful to keep these problems in mind when designing interfaces, explaining concepts, or just being empathetic with people who struggle. I’m not convinced that making interfaces so simple and “intuitive” that anyone can truly learn them on their own is even possible, maybe not even desirable since it encourages more of that kind of rugged individualism in computing and eliminates a lot of creative potential through locked-down apps and systems.

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