There is a serious lack of empathy on display in this post. What are you talking about? Everything you know about Joe, you are learning from this post. If the

There is a serious lack of empathy on display in this post. What are you talking about? Everything you know about Joe, you are learning from this post. If the author has no empathy, how come she can describe Joe's emotional state so accurately that it practically moves you to tears? And I think you need to make allowances for the genre. This essay is a bit impersonal because it's a designer reporting to an audience of designers. The tone is necessarily a bit cold and analytical. I wouldn't assume that the actual interview went down like this, just as doctors don't talk to cancer patients the way they talk to other doctors, engineers don't talk to civilians the way they talk to other engineers, and sausage makers have secret ingredients because... you really don't want to know what they are. Just enjoy the flavor. As for whether it is cruel to cause someone stress by asking them to use a UX that frustrates them: Well, maybe. But if you have ever shipped a product, you have caused such pain. Not one customer at a time, but wholesale: Dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of people have cursed your product. Such is the tragedy of the mass market: You can make the delight scale, but the frustration also scales. The authors of, say, Word didn't want to frustrate anyone to the point of tears, but every day thousands of people are so frustrated, because bugs are inevitable, and because no design can do everything, and because people don't always understand the mismatch between your product and their goals, and because computers are less personal than the least personable of persons.