> You can't upgrade the users.

You absolutely can. You just have to state and keep stating that the system is for adults who can be bothered to read half a page of instructions once in their life, instead of fostering a culture of ignorance.

We have a similar problem with software UX, too.

People are not going to read and remember detailed instructions for every one of the hundreds of devices in their daily lives. If that means they're stupid, then you have to design for stupids. It sucks, but that's how it goes.

You're quite right that this is an ongoing problem in software UX. The problem is devs who insist that the user should accommodate the software rather than the other way around.

> People are not going to read and remember detailed instructions for every one of the hundreds of devices in their daily lives.

I'm not saying hundreds. I'm saying couple dozen. Anything you interact with more often than twice in a lifetime. Nobody complains that they have to learn how to use a pen. Or a bike. Or a car. Or a gas stove. Or a microwave oven. People just suck it up, spend the necessary effort, and enjoy significantly improved capabilities. If you use something daily, you owe it to yourself to learn how to operate it.

What we have with modern UX trends is a culture that despises learning. It's a marketing artifact - a software sells by first impression, not by value delivered, so the less learning user needs to get first results, the easier it is to sell a product or service.

> You're quite right that this is an ongoing problem in software UX. The problem is devs who insist that the user should accommodate the software rather than the other way around.

I meant precisely the opposite and you know it :). The rationale is this: the only way to have software that can be used by a newcomer to its full potential within first 5 seconds of exposure is to dumb the software down to near-uselessness. Which is the dominating trend nowadays. Lowering the beginning of the learning curve by flattening the entire curve creates a hard ceiling on utility of a piece of software (or hardware). If there's nothing to learn, the user is forever stuck at beginner productivity levels. Which means the software isn't really providing much value (it probably provides negative value if the user was forced to upgrade from older software which allowed for mastery).

It's pretty frigging amazing though with software that people will absolutely not spend a half hour reading documentation before they just start trying to poke and prod at things. In other industries, you have to go through mandatory trainings on a regular basis on your equipment.

> If that means they're stupid, then you have to design for stupids.

No, because it means they're being stupid, not that they are "stupids", like it's a zodiac sign. So they should stop being stupid.

> The problem is devs who insist that the user should accommodate the software rather than the other way around.

Writing good documentation is accomodating users, and there is a lot of stuff that is very simple but still can't keep to a common way of how things work (because it's all mostly fluff functionally anyway, and needs to "differentiate itself" in some gimmicky way), and none of it has decent documentation -- so people are left to ask each other in random forums or elsewhere how anything works. IMO that's being lazy, and not paying users for work the developers should have done.

If it was designed "for stupids", it would have very clear instructions in big letters which still would hold true after 20 years, because "stupids" don't always have the latest thing.

https://www.gpsoft.com.au/help/opus12/index.html

Nobody remembers that, or reads all of it just for fun. But it's all there if you need, thorough and up-to-date. Old Opera was also like that, and none of my non-techie friends or relatives ever had problems with it. I'm sure many other programs still are, as in they do follow allll the best practices an application "designed for dummies" would, but then they also have a good documentation, and maybe a CLI interface and other things a programmer might want so called power-users (as opposed to powerless consumers?) to have. Current users are getting ripped off by being trained and conditioned by marketing departments, not peers and teachers with good intent.

> power-users (as opposed to powerless consumers?)

I like to think of it in terms of frequency/duration of use. There may not be many (relatively) "power users", but there are a lot of 9-5 users. People who have to work with a piece software 8+ hours a day at work, day in, day out. If a piece of software has near-flat learning curve, it's contributing a lot to the misery of those people. Like, 6 hours straight of clicking through a slow web UI kind of misery, where unbloating the UI would cut that literally in half, adding keyboard shortcuts would cut that in half again, and a semi-decent batch mode would let them be done in 15 minutes, go get coffee, and start working on something else.

Where's the "value" such "user-friendly" software provides the users again?

And here also lies the answer to the age-old question - why people use Microsoft Excel for everything? Because it's a tool for "power users", with no ceiling in sight. It's flexible where most dedicated software is stiff, which gives people a way to optimize their work.

I also think saying "we don't bother with documentation or configuration because nobody reads or uses that" is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

That always risks being patronizing, but at least we should allow users options and deeper documentation, for those who want to use them -- they shouldn't get punished by being restricted to the lowest common denominator. That doesn't mean there can't be friendly defaults, "wizards", and whatnot.

> I also think saying "we don't bother with documentation or configuration because nobody reads or uses that" is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Oh yes, and it's so deeply ingrained in the culture.

At my previous job, our customer made us use a pretty crappy, proprietary integrated system for task management, bug tracking and version control. Everyone hated it with passion. It took me over a year to finally stop and think for a moment - that maybe it has some more efficient modes of working, and maybe there is some logic to its organization? I clicked Help -> Manual and, lo and behold, I was looking at a large compiled help file describing everything. Every functionality, the fundamental concepts behind the software's UI and data representation. Hell, it even mentioned the API. 30 minutes later, I still didn't like the software, but I was finally somewhat comfortable with it.

I was probably the first person to do that in that company. A lesson here is that unfortunately, the instinct to bitch about software instead of trying to find a manual is strong even in power users. I took that lesson to heart, and these days I'm e.g. very friendly with Info pages in my OS. Turns out if software you regularly use has a decent manual, reading it (or at least skimming, and I mean cover to cover) has absurdly high payoff.

> they shouldn't get punished by being restricted to the lowest common denominator. That doesn't mean there can't be friendly defaults, "wizards", and whatnot.

Exactly. Lower the start of the learning curve, but don't flatten it entirely, don't dumb down your application for the sake of "easy to use". Power always comes with some amount of complexity and learning.

>You can't upgrade the users.

Yes you can. It's called education. People are generally not idiots. Make it easy for them to learn how to do something right and the overwhelming majority will do that thing right. It's when you leave them to figure out something they have no domain knowledge in on their own that causes problems.

Operating a radiator should not require education or domain knowledge. Its only affordances are "turn up" and "turn down," and neither of those should lead to a failure mode other than touching hot metal and singing yourself.