alt Hacker NewsYep. I've learned that lesson more than once. Maybe one of these days it'll stick... :p
Specifically, I'm not a "designer", but I regularly end up making/changing UIs (mobile apps, web apps/pages, etc). When it comes to design, it really matters who the target audience is.
If you're creating a UI for "mass market", you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances what your average user expects, generally, from UI/UX, and the more you ask them to "invest", the worse you're going to do. On the other hand, if you're making a tool for a B2B (business-to-business) product, you have more freedom to set baseline expectations of what the end user needs to be able to do and understand. You can also expose more powerful options, etc. You can sometimes end up going in very different directions. Even error handling and logging can sometimes be handled differently, depending on the context.
> you have to design to a lowest-common-denominator that balances
Something that's always stuck with me is a bit from the book "Don't Make Me Think" about cost vs. value in attention and complexity, that when you add a feature used by only a small percentage of users you're "taxing" 100% of users for the benefit of a few. That you should optimize for the common path and not edge cases. Over two decades later I still find this an exceedingly difficult challenge to juggle that doesn't just mean hiding advanced features behind extra menus.