“They take one look at the UI and abandon it.”

Hiding inside this page on “user-driven UI” by Brad Woods are two useful things. The first is the concept of “zone of proximal development.” The idea, as I understand it, is that possible tasks you face span a few categories: stuff you already know how to do, stuff you can learn to do on your own, stuff you can learn to do with assistance (e.g. from a teacher), stuff you simply cannot do or imagine doing. The space between these things is a zone. A good book or a teacher would help you navigate the zone, by giving you tasks hard enough that they will expand the zone, or even teach you how to expand it on your own – but not too hard so that you give up in failure and frustration. Woods argues that this doesn’t just apply to traditional classroom teaching, but also software, where the role of the teacher is taken by things like: onboarding walkthroughs, progressive disclosure, tooltips, help menus. The second thing was this quote by Anthony Hobday, who made a few appearances on this…