Free software scares normal people

Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one.

Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I just need ..." is difficult. It takes a single strong-willed defender, or some sort of onerous management structure, to prevent the interface from quickly devolving back into the million options or schizming into other projects.

Simply put, it is a desirable state, but an unstable one.

Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With interface design, everybody knows what a button does and what a text field is for, and developers know more than most about the tools used to create interfaces, so the language seems simple. The problems you need to solve with that language are complex and while failure is obvious, success is much more nebulous and user-specific. So much of what good interfaces convey to users is implied rather than expressed, and that’s a tricky task.

> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces

Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.

As I age, this x1000. Even simple slack app on my windows laptop - clicking in the overview scroll bar is NOT "move down a page". It seems to be "the longer you click, the further it moves" or something equally disgusting. Usually, I dock my laptop and use an external mouse with wheel, and it's easy to do what I want. With a touchpad? Forget it.. I'm clicking 20x to get it to move to the top - IF I can hit the 5-pixel-wide scrollbar. There's no easy way to increase scrollbar size anymore either..

It's like dark patterns are the ONLY pattern these days.. WTF did we go wrong?