There isn’t as much malice in my calling the user an idiot as it might seem. I was recalling a quote by Rick Cook, “Programming today is a race between software

There isn’t as much malice in my calling the user an idiot as it might seem. I was recalling a quote by Rick Cook, “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.” I don’t think that quote means that users are idiots for not being able to use your UX, nor do I think is it saying that you shouldn’t devote effort to making your UX clearer and easier to use. In my view, the message is that UX is a bit like an arms race, or a Red Queen race, or some other kind of race - that is, you should always be improving your UX, and simultaneously you’ll never have the perfect UX that everyone can use for everything they want to do without any confusion. This affects how you react to an instance of confusion: it is not a signal that the UX in question necessarily needs to be changed, as it may be working well for every other user and a change will introduce more confusion. It IS a signal to investigate the UX in question and see if it can be improved, you shouldn’t discard the signal entirely. But that investigation might sometimes conclude the UX design is acceptable! Phrases like “PEBCAK” and “a better idiot” are colorful and thus can appear dismissive and insulting without context, but they do have useful and charitable interpretations too. (To your specific point, in the course of my dev work I have done some UX engineering, and “automatically persist settings from previous session” is actually a feature I have implemented, although iirc the motivation in our case was more about convenience. We found users ended up with more misconfigurations afterward - they would change the settings just fine for one-off unusual cases because they were actively thinking about the settings they needed. Afterwards they would go back to their usual case and NOT be thinking about settings, so they would get caught out, they would change just the one setting they got caught out by, get caught out again, and so on. Multiple misconfigured sessions after every unusual session was an immediate pain point after we made the change, and we ended up reverting it. Long-term, the solution we found the fewest issues with was having the administrator accounts set specific defaults for each user account and the users could choose to deviate from those settings each session. The administrators were generally in a position to weigh each user’s usual use-case along with the risk if that user was misconfigured. It provided most of the convenience we wanted, and it also gave companies the opportunity to develop policies around which settings to use. Even the colorful language has a role to play - I have had the exact thought process of “this user story doesn’t sound like a particularly impressive case of idiocy, so there probably is something wrong with our UX here” quite a few times. The unwillingness to label the user an idiot directly motivated improvements to UX in those cases.)