My mom often asks me to “fix” her phone, which means that she simply ventured to some unfamiliar place and doesn’t know how to get back to where she was supposed to be. For her, when something like that happens, the phone is “broken”.

She has no conceptual understanding of what’s an app and a webpage and why they’re treated differently, she just kinda accepted she uses something called Firefox to do a search and some icon in the phone that has the exact name of the other app she wants to use. She never understood (or cared) what it means to “close” an app if she already does that when she presses home or back, no matter how much I try to explain.

When you think about it, it’s all very confusing for them, and since people making these things already understand them well, they make stuff assuming the users will understand the whole thing as well as they themselves do.

This is why I think the single "home button" interface was one of the most brilliant UI innovations ever (no, I'm not joking) and Apple was insane to abandon it. Hit home (maybe twice, if you weren't on the very first screen of apps) and you're back to somewhere you know. Hit it too many times, nothing bad happens. And it's a physical (or, convincingly physical-imitating) button! It never moves around, it's always in the same place and you can feel it! It's one of the most comfortable, reassuring, and for normal users practically useful UI elements ever created. Even if you hold the button down and get in a "weird" mode (app moving and deleting mode) the way out is to... press the button once. It always works.

No other buttons (visible on the face, anyway) to confuse it for. It's right in comfortable reach of the thumb. "Which button do I push again? Oh right, there's only one."

(I also think going to "swipe up to unlock" instead of the brilliant slider they had before was a big mistake, as far as reducing the level of comfort for the median user)