Obviously, this entry has not stimulated much discussion. However, for the record, I wanted to mention this one thing: though I can frequently be a design snob about many things (UI being only a small subject area) I readily recognize that design is *hard*.

It's easy to talk shit about design and to find flaws, but I know full well that were you to ask me to come up with a great user-interface/easy-chair/faucet I would fail miserably. And think most of us are that way. To paraphrase Potter Stewart, given bad design "I know it when I see it". Asked to come up with guidelines to define it, however, and both of use draw a blank (he was talking about pornography, but I'm sure he'd agree).

I think the real problem with good design, UI or otherwise, is that it requires a nearly superhuman sense of empathy. You have to be able to predict how people not like you will interact with your product, be it a word processing application or a door knob. And that's hard to do. So while it's easy to recognize bad design (and it's all around us), it's very difficult to design things well and we should recognize those around us (like David Watanabe) who make even a limited achivement in getting it right (go Rands).