This recalls my work with Chris Alexander on The Nature Of Order (I should  
give the guy a ring these days...).

Turn the issue around: don't blame software builders for producing bad  
designs. Blame the software for letting them produce bad designs.

Chris' idea for the software we prototyped last year was to guide the user  
through a recipe that would automatically provide an acceptable, maybe  
even good design. You don't need to limit the user in any way to do that,  
the whole thing can be reached by taking various design decisions in the  
correct order.

His favorite example: usually, if you plan a house on an empty lot, you  
start deciding where the house will come. However, you *should* start  
deciding where the terrace/garden should come - the best piece of the lot  
(nicest sun/shade/soil/whatever) should be reserved for that, where the  
house will stand is bulldozered over anyway and doesn't matter. Simply by  
taking these design decisions in a different order, you get a much better  
end result.

Software design shouldn't be hard. I don't think a lot has changed since  
Apple literally wrote The Book on UI design (and subsequently, with MacOS  
X, failed to read it ;)). Jacob Nielsen also came to the conclusion that  
design standards are extremely stable over time. So we know what works and  
what doesn't.

But here I am, constructing user interfaces from scratch by composing the  
lowest possible UI elements, under time pressure, so in another mail to  
this list I'll proudly present a bit of Software-with-a-face which  
flagrantly ignores everything I know about UI design, and then some.

Why? Because the default behavior of this stupid software is to assist me  
in making bad UI's and indeed I ain't got no itch to scratch beyond  
throwing this UI together. Don't blame me, blame Morphic, yeah?

Now, *here* is a nice task for a Usability Team :)