“The experience of people using interactive systems—as in most things—tends to follow the classic bell curve of statistical distribution. For any silicon-based product, if we graph the number of users against their particular skill level, there wiill be a few beginners on the left side, a few experts on the right, and a preponderance of intermediate users in the center.
But statistics don’t tell the whole story. This is a snapshot frozen in time, and while most people—the intermediates—tend to stay in that category for a long time, the people on the extreme ends of the curve—the beginners and experts—are always changing. The difficulty of maintaining a high level of expertise means that experts come and go rapidly. Beginners, on the left side of the curve, change even more rapidly.

Although everybody spends some minimum time as a beginner, nobody remains in that state for long. That’s because nobody likes to be a beginner, and it is never a goal. People don’t like to be incompetent, and beginners—by definition—are incompetent. Conversely, learning and improving is natural, rewarding, and lots of fun, so beginners become intermediates very quickly. For example, it’s fun to learn tennis, but those first few hours or days, when you can’t return shots and are hitting balls over the fence are frustrating. After you have learned basic racket control, and aren’t spending all of your time chasing lost balls, you really move forward. That state of beginnerhood is plainly not fun to be in, and everybody quickly passes through it to some semblance of intermediate adequacy. If, after a few days, you still find yourself whacking balls around the tennis court at random, you will abandon tennis and take up fly-fishing or stamp collecting.

The occupants of the beginner end of the curve will either migrate into the center bulge of intermediates, or they will drop off of the graph altogether and find some activity in which they can migrate into intermediacy. However, the population of the graph’s center is very stable. When people achieve an adequate level of experience and ability, they generally stay there forever. Particularly with high cognitive friction products, users take no joy in learning about them. So they learn just the minimum and then stop. Only Homo Logicus finds learning about complex systems to be fun.”