by starkparker | 2025-05-27 15:38:45+00:00
> Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur

Obviously, maybe more obviouisly now than ever in recorded history, not all humans are smart or capable.

Regardless of capability, however, many humans excel at memorizing complex routes across obscure paths that they experience through spaced repetition, which research suggests can alter memory pathways in the brain to facilitate easier recall[1] and also engages memory functions in our nervous systems beyond our brain.[2]

Any UI, including bad ones, can foster efficient workflows in any user _if_ it accomplishes things compatible with repetitive use:

- the UI's behaviors and interactions are minimally interally consistent

- the UI has pathways from a starting point to a result that are discoverable through those behaviors and interactions

- the UI's reactions to input are sufficiently efficient to avoid arbitrary or dynamic pauses, which can disrupt effective repetition

- the UI's interactions are minimally accessible to people; if they use buttons, shapes, colors, sounds, controls, etc., a person can consistently distinguish between and physically access them when necessary

- a person interacts with the UI long enough to find those pathways from starting points to results, and does so repetitively over long time spans

Modern UI design often attempts to reduce the time to value for users at arbitrary experience levels, at the expense of maintaining the consistency of pathways that reward longtime users who have accumulated training.

The only people using the UI when the change happens are people with a non-zero amount of accumulated training. Any change disrupts consistency. It's a net negative to the people who are around to complain about it, and also resets the often competitive field of users; not only do experienced users have to relearn their workflows to avoid committing errors or wasting time, they also have to compete with new users who have easier access to results that previously required experience through repetition to efficiently reach.

For example, a UI designer might change the UI to surface a feature that they want users to access more easily by making it require 1 or 2 interactions to reach, but a veteran user already has "easy" access to that feature even if it takes 6 or 7 interactions to reach it, some of them obscure. If the change removes the result from the end of the old pathway and moves it to a new one that experienced users don't know, the new UI becomes less efficient for them no matter how smart or capable they are (or aren't). Both the new user and experienced user might be smart and capable or stupid and incompetent; the differentiating factor is experience.

Arguably, the "smart and capable humans" who use complex UIs are either the ones who achieve a level of power to prevent UI changes that degrade consistency of existing pathways to preserve their productivity at the expense of less-experienced users needing more time and training (at which point they probably don't need to use that UI anymore anyway, and the act mostly rewards other experienced users), or the ones who divert time that might be spent complaining about UI changes toward adapting to the new UI's pathways.

The truly disruptive UI/UX changes for repetitively used workflows are the ones that introduce unpredictable delays between interactions. Repetition rewards rhythm and consistent feedback, and unpredictable interaction delays destroy both.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07425-w

2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x