Working with my aging mother, modern UIs are very complicated. Ever changing gestures, hidden menus, differences between machines, passwords, multi-accounts, et

Working with my aging mother, modern UIs are very complicated. Ever changing gestures, hidden menus, differences between machines, passwords, multi-accounts, etc. I'm 41, and, you know, the sort of person who reads HN, i.e., can find my way around a command line, sling enough code to get out of a paper bag, etc. And I can't make sense out of many modern UIs. Half of them are just forests of unlabeled icons. Like, ok, what is the thing that looks like a squirrel making out with a lawnmower supposed to do? The other half are menus inside menus inside menus inside menus where finding the functionality you want is damn near impossible. No government or corporate webform gives you all the information you need up front---no company discloses the full price until you're about to put the credit card in, no government tells you what documents you need until you're ten pages into the application. And don't even get me started on fashionable startups. I just joined an organization that used (past tense, I helped kill it) Basecamp to organize communications, and that thing has a totally different arbitrary nonlinear ontology from every other preexisting human communication technology. What the hell is a campfire and why can't I find my pings and what were the designers thinking to just randomly drop all of this extra cognitive load on people's heads like a pigeon with diarrhea? UI designers, please, just stop!