[blargey]

Might be that military pilots are much more engaged with the product than the average google-user with search.

Or how these digital tools pervade spaces where everyone has to be able to use them, even if they're the type that refuses to engage with the text displayed in message boxes or technical jargon like "files" and "tabs", because they have the expertise that is more valuable to the business than the peripheral software. A greater expectation and insistence that things "just work", that the tools get out of the way instead of integrating with the user.

Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't.

[Swizec]

> Maybe adjusting some straps and seat positions is more intuitive than digging for advanced options. Maybe it's significantly more difficult to surface options in digital mediums without introducing friction as a side-effect, because you're always fighting over screen real estate and screen legibility, instead of being able to just add a latch on the strap that's there when you need it and invisible when you don't

You design a different car to win F1 races, to take a couch across town, to drive a family on a weekend trip, to win rally races, to haul a boat … but in software we don’t want to do that. We want everything to do everything because “niche” markets are too small for companies to keep growing into the stratosphere.

See also: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. (zawinski's law)

[evilduck]

There’s a military, and by proxy a government and a country’s populace behind a pilot who are all invested in a pilot’s success. In battle or on missions they don’t get many do-overs and pilots and planes are expensive to mobilize and to lose. Millions of dollars are on the line each time they take off, better to get it right the first time.

For ad driven search engine products the more you as a user flail the more ads you can be served on subsequent searches, so long as they ride the line of not driving you away entirely. A string of ten searches that fail you is bad because their product looks ineffective but two or three searches to get what you want is better for their bottom line than nailing it on your first attempt.