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Comment by msy | Hacker News Reader

This is the difference between accessible and efficient. Bloomberg, and aircraft controls are expert interfaces, they have steep learning curves and in the latter require case extensive education to use (Bloomberg also does a ton of work on user training). Which is absolutely fine when efficiency trumps everything else and it's a system people use all day every day.

Most interfaces we use on a day to day basis are the opposite, they're designed to be accessible (in the sense that you can use it if you are unfamiliar, not disability) for someone unfamiliar, untrained, and uninterested in learning, which also aligns a lot of the time with sales growth. Nobody is willing to do a 6 week course to use the new HR UI really, really efficiently. The unfortunate thing is some of these are enterprise UIs some of us do have to use all day every day and that's where the impedance mismatch gets painful.

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Strongly agree with you. Doug Engelbart (of mouse + groupware + hypertext fame) once said that if ease of use were the only design criteria, we would all ride tricycles instead of bicycles.

Not every user interface has to be or should be walk up and use. But there also needs to be a clear payoff to training.

Teaching my kids to ride bicycles has reminded me how amazing humans are:

A primate that evolved primarily to climb trees first and then run on the savanna somehow learned how to balance on a two wheeled machine.

And you can extend that out into things like neurosurgery and air to air combat.

> Most interfaces we use on a day to day basis are the opposite, they're designed to be accessible

I read this and then I think of glass doors with handles on both sides that I don't open till I read the instruction on the affixed plate: PUSH/PULL. The door forces this decision on every single conscientious user. These things are everywhere, including software interfaces.

As a point of interest, the PULL handles are supposed to be vertical, and the PUSH handles horizontal.

But that doesn't always look nice on a glass door.

Accessibility peaked around Windows 95 and Windows 98 when buttons were clearly buttons, scrollbars were clearly scrollbars, and clickable text was in blue and underlined. We're now well past that, and without familiarity with disappearing scrollbars, three-dot menus and other obscure means of navigation, it's very unintuitive to get around. We don't even have manuals anymore if you do want to learn how things are supposed to be used.

> Most interfaces we use on a day to day basis are the opposite, they're designed to be accessible (in the sense that you can use it if you are unfamiliar, not disability) for someone unfamiliar, untrained, and uninterested in learning, which also aligns a lot of the time with sales growth.

Must be why my fghxjing iOS jorard doesn’t work, and why searching for “preferences” (which is what it is called on Mac) doesn’t open “Settings”. Bonus points for gazillion of gestures that require the Necronomicon to decipher.

Was going to say almost exactly this. Very similar experience in my background as well (CAD interfaces).

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