[thaumaturgy]

One of my clients explained this phenomenon perfectly to me once, and it's an explanation that I've yet to see anywhere else.

Programmers are accustomed to thinking in abstracts: data structures, pointers, memory addressing, program logic, pipes, files, and so on are all abstract concepts. Although you can describe them using strained metaphors for the real world, they don't really represent real-world things.

But most people don't think that way; they think in terms of the tangible. That's part of why the concept of the computer "desktop" is so confusing for novice users, or why the idea of layering in a user interface is nearly not navigable for new users.

It had never occurred to me that other people didn't think in abstracts. I grew up programming; I learned my first programming language while I was also learning my first human language.

[tomkarlo]

To put it another way: being a good software developer requires the ability to internalize and traverse complex mental models entirely within your head, then convert them into a set of models and rules that implement that mental model for others to use. So as a group, developers are self-selecting for being very tolerant of a relatively complex UX relative to the median user.

I suspect you could find this in other fields - for example, I'd be that a commercial airlines pilot is pretty good at maintaining a complex mental model of his aircraft's systems in his head. But very few of those fields are asked to create products / experience for a set of users that does not have that same capacity to deal with abstract mental models.

Making that worse is the fact that at least in most physical systems, there are constraints on complexity and process, or established social scripts for a process. (E.g. most of us "know" how a restaurant works, and we all definitely know how the ordering process works.) Software doesn't have those constraints so you can get into trouble fast.