I hope this will be the start of a beautiful series in which I can navigate the meanders of human psychology from the perspective of experience engineering. I’d like to begin, however, with how much the world has changed since I was a 5–6 year old kid, how far we’ve come — and how we might be making ourselves dumber in the process.
First of all, I think every 30-something knows devices like the Atari, Amiga, Commodore, or the old DOS PC. From time to time I think back to those machines, especially when I can’t find a menu item in an iPad app or some other first-world tragedy strikes. I remember quite well how much I had to figure out to do my first multi-disk archive copy — I still remember it was a pirated copy of Doom that my buddy’s dad gave me (it didn’t work). Norton Commander helped a little, but not much. At least I could eventually copy things from left to right. My point, though, is that all that tinkering forced me to learn not only commands but also English. On top of that, it required at least some rudimentary use of logic — so for a 5–7 year old kid, I was actually learning something.
Today, my kids are not quite 3 years old and they can use Windows Mobile and iOS without much trouble. They launch games, they can call mom/grandma/uncle, even YouTube isn’t a big challenge. Beyond operating icon taps, though, they won’t take much away from it — because every available action is right under their finger. If the icon isn’t under that finger, the thing simply can’t be done. My slightly older nieces and nephews (ages 6–11) use Windows 10 fairly competently, but it mostly ends at running YouTube or League of Legends — advanced operations like finding something in a hidden system application folder (PunkBuster isn’t working…) are a much bigger problem.
Is general thinking under threat?
It’s very important to note that my stories above are absolutely not meant to convey “things were better in my day and young people respected their elders.” I, for instance, didn’t watch Umizoomi or Blaze, which teach logic, basic math, geometry, even physics. On the other hand, how much of my current knowledge, logic, and general thinking I “outsource” to Google is somewhat frightening. Honestly, when it comes to my own internal, personal knowledge — I’ve gotten significantly dumber since high school. If I had grown up in an era where knowledge was always and everywhere at my fingertips, and the absolute hardest part of entertainment was deciding which genre I felt like right now, my life might have taken a very different path.
This is reflected both in my nieces and nephews and in myself — the desire to seek solutions beyond the obvious default is reduced to a minimum. Unless it directly concerns my professional or hobby interests (design, coding, writing), the thought of spending time hunting for a one-off solution is honestly enough to make me want to cry. Looking it up on YouTube (which again hands my reasoning and logical process over to someone else) is only slightly less painful. From my — admittedly limited — experience with kids aged 8 and up, things look similar, if not worse.
Following this line of thinking further, I think I have a problem: when something breaks, I’d rather just replace it or take it in for service. Ask your parents how many things they replaced versus how many they repaired themselves. Of course, it’s not just mental laziness at play — society is also growing wealthier and can afford that kind of frivolity. But as we know, everything is connected to everything else, so this is simply one of the factors that allows me to be made dumber — by my own request.
So where does UX fit into all of this?
Here’s the uncomfortable part — as someone who spends his days thinking about how to make interfaces frictionless, I am professionally complicit in this. “Don’t make me think” is practically our industry’s mantra, borrowed from Steve Krug’s foundational book. And he’s right: cognitive load is the enemy of conversion, of adoption, of joy. Nobody wants to read a manual to use a toaster.
But there’s a spectrum we rarely talk about. There’s a difference between removing unnecessary friction — confusing navigation, inconsistent patterns, walls of text — and removing all friction, including the kind that builds capability. A child who learns to read faces friction. A musician learning scales faces friction. A programmer debugging their first memory leak faces friction. That friction isn’t a UX failure — it’s the mechanism through which competence is built.
What worries me is that we are increasingly designing for the former while inadvertently delivering the latter. Apps that do everything for you. Recommendations that decide what you watch, read, buy, and think about next. Interfaces so smooth that the user never develops any mental model of the system beneath — and therefore never grows.
I’m not calling for a return to command-line interfaces or deliberately obtuse software. But I think there’s a design responsibility we don’t talk about enough: the difference between empowering a user and simply serving them. A good tool makes you more capable over time. A bad one — however pleasant to use — quietly replaces you.
The best UX, to my mind, is the kind that lowers the floor without lowering the ceiling. It should be easy to get started, but it should also reward curiosity, exploration, and depth. It should trust the user to grow.
Because the alternative — frictionless, effortless, thoughtless — is not a product of good design. It’s a very comfortable cage.