The first insight for me was that bad design is everywhere. The next day at the conference I spent more time talking to software and Internet users. People like us who build things for a living are intimate with the technology and have a mental model for how it works. The problem comes when we design how the thing is operated. Because our eyes are biased toward how it was built, the complexity of the inner workings is revealed in the interface.
Internal representations become external.
Concepts that are familiar to our development team are quietly assumed to be familiar to everyone. Most people who make things spend most of their time with other people who make things and not with the people who will use them. We tend to look at the product from the inside out and unintentionally design it that way. This can happen no matter how smart or hardworking we are. The second thing I realized was that talented, hardworking people make bad interface design decisions all the time.