alt Hacker News> a common way for regular people to interact with a system is they just... don't have a model. None at all. Like, they click a thing and see what it does, and if it doesn't do what they expect they shrug and click something else. The horror of seeing a non-software person using a software system is realising that they usually cannot tell the difference between expected and unexpected behaviour, because they don't really form expectations in the first place. The computer is more genie than machine.
This is completely lost on most developers, which is why interface and UX designers exist. Developers, especially in FOSS projects, often love to condescendingly assert that users are just not reading the docs, or are not smart enough to understand the software. They’re smart enough— they just don’t want to have to learn about technical implementation details for the same reason most developers are perfectly content to use personal bookkeeping apps instead of learning the best ways to organize that data and making the spreadsheets manually. Most non-technologists get no dopamine hit from solving technical problems, have no need for the requisite knowledge needed to confidently do that, and are often just trying to make the computer do what it must so they can get back to doing what they’re actually passionate and knowledgeable about. When a competing product has an interface built for people without that mental model, it would have to be pretty fucking expensive to not be a no-brainier for most nontechnical users.
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I think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here.
Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").
This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.
Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.
Nobody reads the docs. This will be even more true soon as LLM generated docs become more popular. I once read a user report "would be nice if I could move large Xs to uncover Y", filed a bug report myself to add the feature, and then realized that feature was already added and documented months ago, by me! I just updated it with an unobtrusive prompt/instruction to the UI when relevant. I definitely get lazy sometimes, but if you don't take the extra step to make sure a feature is easily discoverable and understandable in the UI, you're wasting almost all of its potential benefit.
> They’re smart enough
I worked at a small company that had a policy of putting devs on front-line support in a rotation, both because it was too small to have dedicated support staff and because the owners wanted devs to understand how users interacted with the system better.
I can assure you that while some users merely think differently than devs, there is cohort of users who are absolutely not smart enough. It's impossible to do any amount of front-line support without collecting some horror stories.