We have all had the experience of using software and saying out loud “What were they thinking when they built this?” when we run across a certain “feature” or the way a button works—or doesn’t work. It's really easy to get confused by software, but it's also really hard to build software that doesn’t confuse everyone. It's impossible to build software that doesn’t confuse at least some people. For the most part, people are willing to invest almost no time to “learn software”—they want it to just work the way they expect it to.  

Why does most software seem to be difficult to use or is not intuitive? Really good software is challenging and expensive to build because of the skill set required, the fact that it needs to keep moving, and the requirement for integration.

Really good software is the result of a lot of skill sets being applied to a business challenge. It is rare that really good software is built in isolation. A single person rarely has all the skills required to build good software. There are definitely exceptions to this—in fact, I worked with a person like this in the late 1990s. His name was Chris Glon and he was the technical brains behind a start-up called printChannel.