Why natural language matters

When people talk, they rarely bother with precision. Nobody says, “At exactly 18:03 after my dinner.” They say, “after dinner” or “around six.” Loose, approximate, good enough. That’s how our minds work. We operate in broad strokes, not blueprints.

Now compare that with machines. Computers don’t do “around six.” They do 18:00. They don’t do “every other week.” They do “the second and fourth Monday of each month at 11:00.” Machines demand rules. People live in sketches. And the gap between those two is where design earns its keep.

Specificity is the machine’s starting point, but that doesn’t mean it’s the human’s. Precision is required for the system to function, but it isn’t always the best way for people to understand or act. In fact, forcing machine-like exactness onto a human often makes the experience worse. The design challenge isn’t to drag people toward precision. It’s to take that precision and present it in a way that feels natural, consumable, and true to how people actually think.

Picture someone typing, “Walk the dog every day at 11:00 every other week.” In their head, it makes sense. To the system, it’s a contradiction. Is it every day? Or every other week? And what does biweekly even mean? To some people it’s twice a week, to others it’s once every two weeks. The human brain shrugs at the imprecision and fills in the blanks. The computer throws an error. Without design translating, nothing connects.

That’s the messy job of UX. To take something rigid and mathematical, and make it feel natural to people who think in stories. It’s taking the logical, and steering it toward a statement that might be illogical on paper, but makes perfect sense from a human point of view. One side demands exactness, the other can’t help but be inexact. Design is the bridge that allows both sides to feel understood.

And yet, people don’t always want the same thing. What a user craves when calm is completely different from what they crave when stressed. In a relaxed state, a popup deal might feel like a pleasant surprise. In the middle of a hectic day, the same popup feels like someone barging into your room uninvited.

Computers don’t understand this contradiction. They don’t understand that human needs swing wildly depending on stress, ego, or emotion. But design has to. Because an interface that refuses to adapt is not just unhelpful, it is dishonest. More words, more specificity, more detail — none of it matters if the user cannot make sense of it in the moment. If they cannot scan it quickly under pressure, then it never existed at all.

This is why the old refrain, “If a user doesn’t understand X, they shouldn’t be using our platform”, is not just arrogant, it is destructive. It assumes people must bend to the system’s logic, rather than the system bending to theirs. It dismisses entire groups of users, strips away trust, and cuts off revenue. Imagine if we applied that logic elsewhere: “If you’re colorblind, tough luck, this product isn’t for you.” Around one in twelve men are colorblind. Would any rational business accept losing that many people over such negligence?

Here’s another trap: when people give feedback, they are rarely describing what they actually do. They are describing what their ideal self would do. The calm, disciplined, thoughtful version of themselves. Not the stressed, distracted, rushed person they actually are.

The ideal self is a fantasy. It is the person you want to believe you are. The one who always reads the instructions, who never clicks the annoying popup, who acts rationally and consistently. But when real life intrudes, that version never shows up.

And this matters, because users don’t give feedback from their real behavior. They give it from the perspective of their ideal self. Which means they are not telling you what they want in practice. They are telling you what they think they want, filtered through the story they tell themselves about who they are.

But design cannot build for the ideal self. That would be building for a mirage. Design has to build for the messy, flawed, emotional self — the one who shows up late, clicks the wrong button, forgets instructions, and is too stressed to read carefully. That is the real user. That is the person the interface has to serve.

My point is this — your personal annoyance with a design pattern is irrelevant. You might swear, “I would never click that popup.” But conversion does not care about your idealized self-image. Conversion runs on patterns across groups, where individual emotions average out. What matters is not what one person insists they would never do, but what people actually do in the wild.

Every interface is a translation, moment by moment. It is never neutral. It is always shaping the story between a human and a machine.

Design is the translator between the two. It takes the vague, imprecise language of humans and transforms it into something exact enough for machines to understand and act on.

That is why natural language matters — it takes the inexact world of people and makes it exact enough for machines.