On being “user friendly.”

Four clicks can get you a blank pivot table in desktop Excel: select a cell in your data, click Insert, click PivotTable, click OK. Choosing the fields comes next. Microsoft’s instructions are freely available.

In a 2022 survey of 1,000 office workers, 68% described themselves as beginner or intermediate Excel users. The training company conducting it classified pivot tables as an advanced skill. That’s their classification, incidentally. I have questions.

In 2026, basic competency in business software apparently makes you a power user.

An extraordinary time to be alive.

I’ve spent years working with people who use software every day. One of the strangest things about that experience is watching someone repeatedly perform an unpleasant task without investigating whether the expensive machine in front of them might have a better way of doing it.

Copy. Paste. Rearrange. Repeat.

Every Monday.

For years.

Somewhere in the ribbon is a button that would give them their Mondays back. They’ve never clicked it.

I’m interested in that gap: the distance between being capable of learning something and actually making an attempt.

Because the initial return on a little effort can be ridiculous.

Spend an afternoon learning a few useful spreadsheet features and you might improve work you do every week. Learn a handful of cooking techniques and suddenly a much larger portion of the supermarket becomes available to you. Understand a few basic principles of photography and your pictures improve before you’ve bought anything.

There’s a surprisingly large amount of life available at the level of “reasonably competent.”

Mastery is another undertaking. It takes sustained practice, judgment, and attention to details you couldn’t even recognize when you started. But you don’t need mastery to stop being helpless.

You can become useful quite early.

People would be surprised by how much basic competence covers. You learn the vocabulary. You understand the main controls. You make a few mistakes. You discover which mistakes matter. Before long, a thing that previously required someone else becomes a thing you can do yourself.

The awkward beginning is often the admission price.

Which brings me to LogNormal’s interface.

It is considered. I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about what belongs on the screen, how things respond, and what a student can reasonably infer from what’s in front of them.

But I’m not designing around the lowest common denominator.

I’m designing for the best outcomes I can produce. Sometimes that means expecting a student to tolerate a little uncertainty and do some investigating.

Select something. Try a move. Watch what changes. Try again.

You might not understand everything immediately. I’m comfortable with that.

In fact, I would be concerned if repeated use taught you that every uncertain moment should be followed by an instruction appearing to resolve it.

At some point, someone has to develop the habit of looking.

There’s a particular kind of software experience where every action is announced, every option is explained before you encounter it, and every successful click receives encouragement usually reserved for a Labrador returning with the correct ball.

I don’t find that respectful.

Children are capable of learning complicated systems. Watch them with a game they care about. They experiment, compare notes, discover obscure interactions, and become furious when an adult suggests they haven’t understood a rule.

Then we open an educational app and suddenly behave as though they require an escort to cross the screen.

I expect more.

That also means I expect the adults involved to allow an attempt before intervening. “What have you tried?” is a useful question. So is “What happened when you did that?”

Let the child have an answer.

And when something in LogNormal is genuinely confusing, tell me. I want the example. I can change a bad decision quickly. Expecting effort from a learner gives me no exemption from putting effort into the product.

But an interface requiring a moment’s thought is not automatically a failed interface.

Sometimes that moment is doing useful work.

The student has encountered something unfamiliar and discovered that they can begin figuring it out.

That’s a good afternoon’s education.

The pivot table can wait until tomorrow.