Every built thing has someone it was built for: a pair of hands meant to wield it, a set of eyes meant to witness it, a body meant to walk within it. This “someone” can vary from the single recipient of a bespoke gift to a demographic grouping millions strong, but with the diversity of humanity nothing can be for everyone.

And most of the time this isn’t a problem! Nobody would expect an aircraft cockpit made for an office worker, or a sledgehammer for a small child. The problem arises when designers refuse to acknowledge, even to themselves, that their creation is not universal. This is not a new affliction, but one that finds its apotheosis in the tech companies of today. The dream of total market domination tends to wither when confronted by the logistics of putting a physical product in every home, but what about software? If you ignore the data centres (and until the latest AI boom we were very good at doing that), then software seems weightless, immaterial. In the era of The Cloud, what’s stopping you from putting your app in every phone, every tablet and computer?

But even when you declare your product universal, you cannot create the universal user experience. The best you can do is decide on one and pretend it is. And this works surprisingly well if users don’t actually have a choice about using it! If you are gatekeeping something essential, like the ability to stay in touch with friends or access employment, people will adapt to whatever you give them. But they will never be able to banish the silent feeling of “This wasn’t made for me”.

The person it was made for is, more often than not, the “typical” denizen of the tech industry: white, male, tall (yes, really [1]), of above-average wealth – you get the picture. This inevitably leaves its imprint on how products are designed. Menus that appear visually balanced to users with “normal” vision are anything but if you are colour blind or partially-sighted, and UI elements designed for anglophones become subtly clunky in translated editions.

The picture is similarly bleak if you are neurodivergent. Despite Silicon Valley’s superficial reputation for embracing neurodiversity, its products can feel borderline hostile unless you fit a very narrow cognitive mould. Everything is placed in a way you can tell makes sense to someone, but that someone definitely isn’t you. You are an intruder in a haunted house, its every swishing curtain and creaking floorboard a pointed message that you are not its master.

Of course, ghosts aren’t real. You can’t exorcise the Californian from your word processor any more than you can drive the monsters from your closet. But when we treat these spectres with too much gravitas we cede space to them they don’t deserve – the actual user of the software is you, and if you can’t understand it, it has failed, no matter how many hypothetical people found it easy.

[1] Cinnirella, F. and Winter, J.K., 2009. Size matters! Body height and labor market discrimination: A cross-European analysis.