Everyone has to admit there's a lot of programming minutiae that could and should be thrown overboard.
If you show your language / app / webpage to someone and they ask "Why is X preventing me from doing work?", it would behoove all of us to honestly ask ourselves "Is X important enough that we should keep it?"
Otherwise, we end up with 10,000 gotchas and only someone who studies for 2 years can use things. And I'd personally much rather that surgeon be studying medicine for those 2 years!
Which is a different way of saying that most computer UI still sucks for most users. I agree, and I think that one of the key reasons programmer-y people are successful at navigating computer tasks that stymie the proverbial grandma is this: faced with a question about how to accomplish a task inside some UI, we're just inherently more likely to follow a similar train of thought as the person who wrote the program in the first place, and reach the correct conclusion. (And case-sensitivity in a username is exactly the kind of keen (textual) detail that we're both wired and trained for.)
In other words, we're just iterating on trying things [as xkcd observed][0]. The key is that inside that first decision box, locating an action to try, we have a huge leg up on the "...which looks related to what you want to do" part. I sometimes describe this as "knowing how computers think", but really it's knowing how the people that wrote the program think.
Not that it's an easy problem, but I think we still have a lot of work to do as a field, to make stuff accessible to people whose brains don't follow the same patterns as ours.
Agreed - great insight. And this effect is exacerbated when there is genuine malicious intent on the internet. I've sat with my mum or dad on several occasions, when they've been confused by 'ads' on websites which are designed to look like dialog boxes.
It was far too difficult for me to explain how to tell that this was not a legitimate dialog box. Or understand the concept of phishing.
