# > My mom isn’t dumb, but she has not and never had any interest in learning
how tech works.

This is precisely the audience I am most concerned about. (See my other
response, or my other articles on the subject.) People who identify…

* * *

> My mom isn’t dumb, but she has not and never had any interest in learning
how tech works.

This is precisely the audience I am most concerned about. (See my other
response, or my other articles on the subject.) People who identify as
technical are willing to learn how to use almost any system, and misidentify
certain kinds of skills (like an elaborate mental model of widget interactions
in WIMP GUIs) as universal while claiming that other, substantially more
common skills (like inventing a procedure for solving a problem with available
tools) are unavailable to ‘non-technical’ users.

More flexible interfaces are easier to reason about without technical
knowledge because fewer problems require using corner cases and dirty hacks to
solve.

The ‘normal end user’ experience of a computer is one where nothing works
quite the way one expects and nobody can tell you quite why, and so doing
anything complicated requires formulating an elaborate plan and using a bunch
of tools far outside their intended domain — in other words, the ‘non-
technical’ end user is a master hacker owing to her unfamiliarity with the
tools and concepts necessary for making clean solutions to her problems.

> do you have any concrete examples of UI done right?

I cover a handful of already existing examples in prior essays (including the
Canon Cat), and [pitch some ideas for new
ones](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/alternate-computer-universes-jef-raskins-
macintosh-1a3f19b9110a?source=friends_link&sk=7f6a4e5b23e6f01542069f87c62eab27).
My next book is a survey of interesting interfaces, and hopefully will answer
the question so many people keep asking — “where is your exhaustive list of
alternatives”.

The main problem with the Macintosh UI is not that it is a bad interface
(though it is), but that it is the _only_ interface most people are aware of,
and the _only_ interface most people can imagine. This means that everything
it’s bad at, in the eyes of most programmers and users, becomes simply “hard
to do on a computer”.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [November 17,
2018](https://medium.com/p/52bbedf70c82).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/my-mom-isnt-dumb-but-she-has-not-
and-never-had-any-interest-in-learning-how-tech-works-52bbedf70c82)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.