UX learnings from the piano

The Ossia Cadenza from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 is considered one of the most challenging codas for a pianist to master. It comes about 11 minutes into the first movement and for two and a half minutes the orchestra rests while the pianist climbs up an impossible crescendo of huge chords and a monumentally sustained peak of noisy, emotive ruckus. In this video, a brilliant Juilliard student, Rachel Breen, rehearses the famous section. (The video stops just as it's getting good, but Rachel is nonetheless astonishing)

As a young boy I remember being drawn to the piano in the living room of our home. The white and black keys could produce an amazing amount of sound in exchange for very little effort. Yet it was also frustratingly difficult to produce anything that sounded good. Both my parents could play, so I knew what good was. The piano is not what we would call “User-friendly”. Eighty-eight keys which are easily struck, but the learning curve is steep, and the documentation is terrible.

Learning to play the piano is much more difficult than operating most modern software. Even if I asked someone new to Microsoft Azure to create several virtual machines with storage and deploy them with a virtual network in a public cloud, they could probably be successful after two or three attempts.

Yet, despite the difficulties, people manage to persist and become great concert pianists. Lack of usability is overcome. A poor initial user experience does not deter them. Why is this?

Maybe it has something to do with challenge and reward, combined with intense engagement and immediate feedback? It would be hard to bring this intensity into the discipline of software design, but I need to recognize the importance of challenge, reward, intense engagement and immediate feedback in my designs.