There are more beginners then there are experts, so in the absence of research a beginner UI is a safer bet.

If you’re in the business of creating high quality UX, and you’re building a UI without even the most basic research–understanding your target user–you’ve already failed.

And yes, if you definite “beginner” to be someone with expert training and experience, then yes an expert UI would be better for that “beginner”. What a strange way to define “beginner” though.

If I’m building a product that’s targeting software developers, a “beginner” has a very different definition than if I’m targeting grade school children, and the UX considerations will be vastly different.

This is, like, first principles of product development stuff, here.

Unless you’ve actually done the user research, you have no idea if a “beginner friendly UX is a safer bet” . It’s just a guess. Sometimes it’s a good guess. Sometimes it’s not. The correct answer is always “it depends”.

Hell, whether or not a form full of fields is or isn’t “beginner” friendly is even debatable given the world “beginner” is context-specific. Without knowing who that user is, their background, their training, and the work context, you have no way of knowing for sure. You just have a bunch of assumptions you’re making.

As for the rest, human data entry that cannot be automated is incredibly common, regardless of your personal feelings about it. If you’ve walked into a government office, healthcare setting, legal setting, etc, and had someone ask you a bunch of questions, you might be surprised to hear that the odds are very good that human was punching your answers into a computer.

Without knowing what the user is actually doing, that’s impossible to know. If the user has to input all those fields on a regular basis, then that one screen is the superior UX.

That third screenshot, assuming good keyboard navigation, would likely be a godsend for anyone actually using it every day for regular data entry (well, okay, not without fixes–e.g. the SSN and telephone number split apart as separate text boxes is terrible).

This same mindset is what led Tesla to replace all their driver friendly indicators and controls with a giant shiny touchscreen that is an unmitigated disaster for actual usability.