the most user friendly software is the one they don't notice had work put into it, no sharp corners, rough finish, weird edges. no marks or imperfections, you're putting in all of the effort to make the thing simple.
and I wonder how much that has warped everything
Because everything they do on their computing devices is poking files and folders on someone else's PC.
I guess I should elaborate:
most people do not interact with a filesystem. They have no need to, on Windows or otherwise. Word saves to their documents folder, chrome to their downloads folder, etc. if you haven't worked in an office that still does a lot of filing cabinets, the metaphor may not even occur to you.
with that, for late gen x and then millennials, there was a push for computer education in schools, though that was obviously unevenly applied, and now even the ""good"" schools have maybe a two hours a week class one quarter per four years.
but people already know those parts.
im speculating here, but here's the vibes: anglosphere Gen Z hit it's "peak" at the same time companies and software started "expanding to markets" that previously did not have computers at all. You no longer had to teach or be taught, because suddenly there was ease of access, as long as you didn't care about your files having robust hierarchy.
every other generation self selected into the people who taught themselves or were taught, and the people who just treated their computers as appliances if they used them at all, until everything changed and the Internet was ubiquitous and necessary.
is it good for interface design that we've done this? who knows, I don't think so, but I have survivor bias here. it's probably all of these things. but the number of people with computers exploded around 2015
but if they re-ran the polls in like, a year or two i bet we'd see a pretty even distribution
maybe making multiple generations of computer users pass around their digital things in arcane, fragile, difficult to access ways does the same thing to computing as like, forcing 7 year olds to memorize double digit times tables does to math; it breeds contempt but it's central to their lives so they're also helpless to do anything about it. idk
