> Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure o

> Today, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of how poorly designed or inefficient they may be. Not sure if I agree, and anyway this doesn't seem to be the assumption of mainstream modern UI design. Rather we have extreme simplification justified by the need not to overwhelm the users and isolate them from (arbitrarily) "less needed" features and technical considerations. I don't know if UI departments base this on research and studies, but anecdotally both for me and non-technical people I know smartphones have become black boxes due to this. We often discover features by accident, not sure how we even triggered them. Many simple tasks have to be googled, because there seems to be little logic in where they're hidden. Maybe very young people are better at this - though on the other hand we hear about them being less PC platform-literate - and this knowledge still feels like a random collection of incantations rather than a system you could master. Maybe I wouldn't hold up Windows registry, Office 2000 etc. as paragons of mental tractability, but I would posit that 1. the filing cabinet mental model was useful in learning generalizable, organized knowledge of using computers, 2. it has been destroyed by tech corporations for the mass audience. I don't believe that we are fundamentally dumber compared to 1990s, we could figure this out if given a chance.