"User experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, and creators when creating and refining products because negative user experience can diminish the use of the product and, therefore, any desired positive impacts. Conversely, designing toward profitability as a main objective often conflicts with ethical user experience objectives and even causes harm. User experience is subjective. However, the attributes that make up the user experience are objective. "
Last year, I wrote a not very long at all article about what makes something good UX. The main feature was actually just a link to a video about how people who don't play video games learn how to play video games and in that video "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild" was preferred by beginners because of its natural tutorials that guide the user into understanding how to do something when the context for it applies (showing how to pick up a stick when the character is next to a stick). This may have given the impression that this game had good UX, but in a comment in that thread I had posted another video that details how the button layout associations confuse an experienced user "Why do I throw my weapon when I'm trying to use Ultra Hand"
So this article is dedicated to things that have great UX and terrible built in tutorials (or none at all) and therefore are not beginner friendly. By dedicated of course I mean I have 3 examples, but if you have more feel free to share them.
VIM
This may feel like I'm starting out strong, but actually this article is inspired by another article that makes this exact point. VIM is not only about speed
Vim is not beginner-friendly, this is pretty much common sense. But there are other aspects of the user experience that in my perception make Vim an amazing experience for advanced users that other tools don’t even come close to.
And often what would be intuitive to a beginner can be slow or bothersome to an experienced user.
Good UX for a beginner who needs to type in a text editor is horrible shitty UX for someone who needs to append the same word or character to the start of 60 lines (because they're a programmer)
The commentary of this article by this guy is very insightful:
With comments such as "I don't even think of the shortcuts, I just think about what I want to do and I just do them". Any gamer knows how this feels. No gamer thinks "X YYY left bumper" They just think "jump over ground attack, attack attack attack block!" And not even that really.
Hyprland
I didn't write this to flex my NixOS hyprland install (its not even very well configured lol), but when it is configured, its the best UX ever. Its not even stuff you couldn't do on Cinnamon, Mate, Windows, but just the way it uses things like alternate desktops and window switching and just puts them the way you would put them on your own on other systems in the first place (with the option to free float windows, just not the default behavior) just makes it so good. Other desktops are actually cumbersome to use in comparison as a result.
The problem is (at least on my setup) everything is a hotkey and nothing is a menu. Maybe if you use sway instead, you can click between the desktops, but really its just better to know the hotkeys. From knowing how to move a window to another desktop screen, to knowing the hotkey to search for an app to open I really mean it when I say everything is a hotkey. Not beginner friendly, but it does allow for you to be highly productive.
Bitcoin core, which usually looks like a windows 95 program looks kinda modern on hyprland.
What isn't shown in this hyprland demo video is how if you want to set up another program to share the same screen space as a program you're working on and you know normally you have to drag it to the edge of the screen and all of this, on hyprland, you hover your mouse over the program, hit superMod (aka the windows key) + shift + the desktop number and bam its on the same screen as the other app and out of the other apps way. Hey btw, you ever had your mouse over a program and started typing only to realize you forgot to click the program "whoops, typed that in the wrong chat" moment. In hyprland, moving your mouse over a window actually means you're going to type in that window lol.
Oh and just so we're clear all of this great UX, is good UX post install. All of the configuring that a typical hyprland user would do would of course be bad UX.
Alright enough gushing over hyperland.
Conclusion
So is beginner friendly design in opposition to good UX? Absolutely not. You can combine the two elements to make something easy to grasp for beginners that's great to use for people who grow with your software too. However, a lot of modern software design is misused and misunderstood. Somewhere along the way, beginner friendly and good UX got mixed up, and I just think its time to correct that.