nology we create results in the same sort of confused, lost experience. In our work we constantly see people who can’t find a menu item they’ve found before, are uncomfortable exploring configuration, or don’t know how to select multiple items. What should be easy is daunting, complex, misunderstood, frustrating, sometimes feared, and often ignored.

In our producer-consumer society, the users don’t have the mental model that the makers have. While we like to point to the viral video of infants using iPads or tell the joke about our children having to show us how to install a piece of software, we have to ask ourselves if we believe that the youngest generation doesn’t—and won’t—have the same set of fundamental disconnects between how they understand technology interactions and how designers create those interactions. Even if that’s true, do we want to wait (in a manner of speaking) until today’s video star is 80 and we’re all long gone before we have a society that is enabled by, instead of frustrated by, technology?

 

Does It Bring New Experiences and Capabilities into People’s Lives? In our communities of practice, we think about this a lot: discussions of meaning, storytelling, and delighters are ever present in our conferences, mailing lists, and design-planning sessions. Thanks to digital technology, new and meaningful experiences are everywhere we look. We can share photographs immediately from just about anywhere, we can get real-time advice about