This was known if not widely distributed at least 20 years ago.
UI that is accommodating for beginners is debilitating for professionals, and I don't just mean existing professionals as the author mentions.
As a software developer, I want and have the skills to seek a solution where a set of N steps only takes a couple of keystrokes. For everyone else, the best they can get is muscle memory, and most skilled labor ends up leaning on that kind of skill heavily.
So UI that is heavy on feedback may be slow in several ways. It could literally slow down the process, or it could introduce roadblocks due to imprecision. A keyboard shortcut is almost always the same two keys in the same order. Fine motor control is the only limiter. If I substitute a mouse click, now hand-eye coordination is dominant. The guy who always hits the waste paper basket from across the room might not care, but everyone else is poorer for it.
And the thing is, video games have this problem solved, but we haven't adopted the techniques the way we have for earlier innovations. Take World of Warcraft. You start off with a few dozen activities you can perform. At intervals you add another batch of actions, and you celebrate that milestone by building up a tool bar (action bar) by cherry picking the set that speaks to you.
New actions and new ways to manage the actions you have are available as addons, and the very best players don't have the largest number of addons, but the ones they do have are reliable, and they all complement each other.
And every once in a while, an action that is very popular gets included in the base UI. Now everyone gets to use it, and 20% of the userbase already was before it ever launched, so you have more resources available to help you figure it out.
The problem is that the sales teams for the POS machine don't interact with the retail workers. Instead they interact with at best middle managers, or at worst the C-Suite, which generally has minimal software competency and usually have little understanding of the various software solutions serving the domain.
> Imagine a point of sale system. Retail workers have to use that stuff the whole day. This means it nearly never makes sense to sacrifice power user efficiency just to be able to tell some manager who will never have to work with the damn thing: "Look how easy this is to understand".
I’ve made comments about how frustrating this exact scenario is before. I’m glad to see someone else notice that.
As a programmer, I want Good Software to align with work that they'll pay me for. I'm fortunate enough that this is the case with my current work, though I can recognize that this hasn't always been the case over my career.
The more users are able to alter UI/UX, the more they can tailor it to their use case.
There has been so much focus on consistency in UI/UX that we have thrown customization right out the window.
Consistency is valuable, but I think we ought to move its focus away from UI/UX, and down one rung on the ladder of abstraction: to functionality.
We could also make an effort to move UI/UX one rung up the ladder of abstraction, and have a high-level interface for discreet functionalities. This is something that isn't tried often, but seems to work out well when it is.
In a shell, you can set aliases, and even create intermediate functionality to interface with. You can even write software that works as a front end for your shell.
The shell is so far removed from functionality, it hardly implements any at all. Instead, it uses entirely separate programs by providing the user a consistent and configurable interface to those programs.
And yet my dad is constantly confused and frustrated by all these gestures he keeps invoking by accident. In truth, iOS is loaded with power user features that constantly surprise beginners. The same is true for macOS with all of its trackpad gestures and complicated windowing features.
The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS. It had a consistent user interface backed by extensive research into human-computer interaction. It used powerful spatial metaphors that worked with the brain’s spatial memory [1], not against it like today’s “smart” systems that try to guess what the user wants.
This is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing, inserting their own preference in place of Classic Mac OS. For your typical user, I'd wager it will often be the OS to which they were first exposed. (though certainly not always)
Personally, I rather liked Windows 3.11. It did everything I needed at the time, and it was simple enough that I could hold pretty much the entire abstraction of it's configurations, settings, features, etc in my own mental space. Windows 95 was... okay. I managed to skip ME and Vista.
In contrast, Classic Mac OS seemed like a "pretty" OS that crashed for difficult to troubleshoot issues that often required disabling "extensions" and re-enabling them in groups to find the offending one. Until then, you'd experience the supremely unhelpful "type 10 bomb" hard crash. Windows BSOD was annoying, but I hated those bombs.
Oh there’s no question that Classic Mac OS crashed a lot. The underlying technology left a lot to be desired. That’s really beside the point though. None of crashes were caused by the UI design. They were due to a lack of protected memory and corruption of preference files, along with the ad hoc extensions system you mentioned. These problems could all have been solved without abandoning the truly easy-to-use UI.
Modern macOS continues to have a lot of very difficult-to-troubleshoot problems. They don’t usually cause the system to crash, but they’re very annoying to deal with nonetheless. A common one I keep having is random processes using 100% CPU for no readily apparent reason. Take one look at Activity Monitor (or Task Manager on Windows) and you’ll see dozens or even hundreds of processes running in the background. How the heck is my dad supposed to troubleshoot that? He won’t! He’ll notice his computer running hot and battery draining rapidly and ask me to figure it out for him.
Maybe, but they'd be wrong. I didn't grow up using classic Mac OS much, but in hindsight I'd definitely agree that it put more thought into user interaction than anything else I've ever used.
For example a tool that might be exceptional to use for a professional might be very very bad to use for a consumer and vice versa.
Software (in theory) could give multiple target demographics with good consistent etc UX at once by beeing configurable. However there is a clear trend to making everything intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad), often at the expense of people who have to use the software the whole day. In the worst case the whole target demographic of a software is powerusers but the UX still trades off usability for a flat learning curve.
Imagine a point of sale system. Retail workers have to use that stuff the whole day. This means it nearly never makes sense to sacrifice power user efficiency just to be able to tell some manager who will never have to work with the damn thing: "Look how easy this is to understand".