The cursor is vibrating. Or maybe it’s my hand. I have been staring at this 14-inch screen for 45 minutes, and I am currently paralyzed by two rectangular buttons of the exact same shade of battleship grey. One says ‘Save and Continue,’ and the other says ‘Submit for Final Review.’ Beneath them, in a font so small it feels like a personal insult, is a warning: ‘Changes cannot be made after submission.’

I am a software engineer. I have spent the last 25 years building systems that handle millions of requests per second. I understand the underlying architecture of the internet, the way packets of data traverse the ocean floor, and the intricate dance of CSS frameworks. Yet, here I am, sweating over a government portal for a simple permit, genuinely terrified that clicking the wrong grey box will consign my application to a digital black hole for the next 15 weeks.

I just finished peeling an orange. It was a perfect, single-piece spiral that now sits on my desk like a citrus skeleton. It’s the only thing that has gone right this afternoon. The orange was intuitive. You find the soft spot at the pole, you apply pressure, and the geometry of the fruit guides your hand. There is no ‘Help’ menu for an orange. There are no dark patterns trying to trick you into peeling the zest when you only wanted the juice.

The Real Divide

We talk about the digital divide as if it were a matter of wires and towers. We frame it as a problem of ‘access,’ as if handing a $355 laptop to someone in a remote village magically grants them entry into the modern economy. But that is a convenient lie. The real divide-the one that actually widens the gap between the empowered and the marginalized-is a divide of usability. It is the invisible tax of frustration that we levy against anyone who hasn’t been trained to think like a broken machine.

I watched Miles S. try to set up a smart thermostat last month. He’s a man who understands the physics of vibration better than almost anyone alive, yet he was defeated by a circular menu that required a ‘long press’ to confirm a ‘short change.’ He eventually just sat on the floor and laughed. ‘It’s a test of patience,’ he said, ‘not a test of intelligence. And I’m too old to pay the patience tax.’

But what happens when you can’t afford to walk away? What happens when the interface stands between you and your healthcare, your legal status, or your ability to feed your family? This is where the usability divide becomes a moral failure. If you are wealthy, you can pay someone to navigate the friction for you. You hire an accountant, a lawyer, or a consultant to deal with the 125-page PDF applications. But if you are working 55 hours a week at two different jobs, you don’t have the luxury of time to decode the ‘Submit’ button’s secret logic. You just get left behind, not because you don’t have a computer, but because the computer is speaking a language designed to exclude you.

I once made a specific mistake in a system I designed for a logistics firm. I put the ‘Delete’ button right next to the ‘Duplicate’ button. They were both 25 pixels wide. I thought it was ‘efficient.’ Three days after launch, an operator accidentally deleted 155 shipping manifests because his finger slipped. He didn’t lack ‘digital literacy.’ He was just a human being with a pulse and a tired hand. I realized then that my design hadn’t been efficient; it had been arrogant. I had assumed the user would always be as focused and clinical as I was when I wrote the code.

We see this arrogance everywhere in essential services. The portals for unemployment benefits or visa applications are often the worst offenders. They are built with the assumption that the user has 35 minutes of uninterrupted focus and a high-speed connection that won’t drop. When I was looking into international travel requirements recently, I was struck by how much simpler it could be when the goal is actually to help the user succeed. I found that using a service like Visament felt like an entirely different reality. It wasn’t just that the buttons worked; it was that the logic was built around human expectations rather than bureaucratic convenience. It was a reminder that the complexity we’ve come to accept isn’t a natural law of technology; it’s a symptom of neglected empathy.

Miles S. often points out that in high-end concert halls, they use ‘diffusers’ to break up sound so it doesn’t create harsh echoes. Our digital environments need the same thing. We need to diffuse the complexity. But instead, we build digital echo chambers where every error message is magnified. If you miss a single field on a 65-page form, the system doesn’t just tell you which one is missing; it often clears the entire page, forcing you to start over. This isn’t a technical necessity. It’s a design choice that says: ‘Your time is worth $0.’

This is the core of the frustration. Bad usability is a declaration of power. It says that the institution’s need for structured data is more important than the citizen’s need for a functional life. When a software engineer like me struggles with a government site, I feel a flash of anger. But when someone who is already struggling with the complexities of survival encounters that same site, they don’t feel anger-they feel defeat. They assume the technology is too ‘smart’ for them, when in reality, the technology is just too poorly built to be useful.