BourbonicPlague on Nostr: I spent the first decade of my career, the ‘90s, helping Silent and Boomer ...

I spent the first decade of my career, the ‘90s, helping Silent and Boomer generation technophobes learn how to use computers while also teaching myself how to write software they could use. I even occasionally did formal day long classes training them how to use Microsoft Excel and Word. I had to start every class teaching several of them how to use a mouse. A few of those people never really understood how to double-click and many people struggled to navigate menus that were nested just because they lacked the dexterity to move the mouse smoothly enough to open one menu level after the other.

I learned that a nontrivial percentage of people can’t deal with hierarchical UIs of any kind. They couldn’t deal with tree views and hierarchical menus and deeply tabbed UIs. The file system was literally impossible for them to understand or navigate. I would bet there is an IQ threshold here if someone ever chose to study it, but since IQ is a taboo subject I’m sure that would never happen.

Anyway, that decade spent supporting people who hate computers but have to use them for their jobs while I was also learning the craft of software development was the perfect preparation for me. The software I built for my business a decade and a half ago is used for only a few months a year by lots of people who don’t care at all about computers, they just care about getting their jobs done. We don’t use any of the UI/UX paradigms that I spent many frustrating hours watching people struggle to understand. We don’t use toolbars with icons only. Our clickable UI elements have words that describe what they do and they animate in a consistent way that tells users they are clickable so users never have to guess which elements they can click on. We don’t assume people can handle drag and drop. We don’t hide UI behind tabs and we never use hierarchy to hide things from users or to make a UI more compact. The only hierarchy is a result of the natural hierarchy that is inherent to the concepts users are already working with every day, and for those concepts we still flatten the hierarchy and show it to users in a single scrollable view. We paginate those lists if we have to, but we don’t hide details behind hierarchical UI. All menus have only one level. People who can’t handle hierarchy can handle scrolling just fine. We have pages that are several pages long because scrolling doesn’t trip users up but almost all the UI paradigms that are used to avoid scrolling do. Our software has a one to one mapping between concepts they use in the real world to do their jobs. We don’t force them to learn a new way to view the world. We use maps to let them navigate geographically important data in places where the geographical relationship between things matters to them. We use colors to show the priority of things on those maps so they can quickly identify potential problems visually. And when all these strategies still fail and users get stuck, a human answers the phone or email or chat when they reach out to us for help and we walk them through it. Even on holidays, weekends, or at 11pm during their busy few months when they are actually using our software. If they need help, a helpful person is there. Even if it is the tenth time they have asked the same damn question. We charge lots of money and that’s what they are paying us for.

My point: even if you and some of your smartest users can handle something you have created, never assume that everyone will be able to. Some users will never understand some things no matter how much you try to explain them. If you have to design something anyone can use there are a bunch of limitations automatically imposed on your design.

Also, there are some subjects that are too complicated for a huge percentage of the population to understand no matter how or how many times you explain them. There is a percentage of the population that will never understand certain aspects of Bitcoin and there is nothing anyone can do to change that. The very nature of the subject is just beyond lots of people and they will always have to resort to trusting people because they will never be able to verify.