When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness.
User interfaces are the first line of computer instruction, and for many people are the last line too. Not every interface designer does their job equally well. The problems mostly emerge from designers’ presuming implicit knowledge from the user that might not really be there. There’s plenty of computer science that seems like obvious common knowledge to programmers and engineers that remains opaque or esoteric to the population at large. For example, the general public uses the terms memory and storage interchangeably, even though they refer to different computer components that function in very different ways.
