Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me.
After mastering academia and enjoying some early success in journalism, advertising, and music composition and production, I poured myself into web design in early 1995, understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and enjoyed a steep and probably undeserved rise in the field until the summer Steve Jobs fired Doug Bowman and me from a web redesign project on apple.com.
After that, Apple software and hardware went wonky for me for close to a decade.
At the time, I half-believed Mr Jobs had put a techno-curse on me. It certainly seemed that way. When my colleagues upgraded to what was then being called OS X, everything worked for them. When I tried, I failed. And failed. And failed.
Some of this was because OS X was secretly incompatible with SCSI cards, a peripheral in common use on System 7 Macs like my Power Computing P120 Mac clone tower, and Apple never bothered to clue us in. But most of it was because what was apparently intuitive for Apple’s new target customer left me bamboozled.
Over the next decade, the Mac software and hardware curse lifted, but my disconnection from what other human beings apparently find intuitive persists. Over time, this flaw (or simply this difference) in my intuition became a UX design superpower, because I’m as capable as any “normal” user of misinterpreting directions, misreading cues, and grabbing hold of what only appear to be affordances.