Might be being a bit harsh here, but the problem is once your QA dept. have seen the 3000+ features that have been squeezed into that fugly BugZilla UI they’ve made the mental decision that this is powerful software & what they need as power users.

Good looking apps like Sifter, which probably does everything they need are dismissed as being too simple & inferior.

(P.S. Harry – you need to make this textarea bigger!)

I think my main quibble was singling out open source, but maybe I’m extra touchy about this since I work with enterprise software every day, and find no lack of crap interfaces there.

I guess my underlying point is that if you surround yourself with certain kinds of UI design patterns, they will start appearing in your own work if you’re not careful.

Open source tends to be written by programmers for programmers, and unless you’re in that target group they tend to be inscrutable. (I cringe every time I have to use Bugzilla.) But most commercial applications aren’t much better in this regard, since they’re usually written to cram in as many features as possible and for the sales department, rather than for the intended users.

I think part of the problem is the more general case – developers are typically surrounded by technical interfaces (command line interfaces, code, developer tools, and so on), which makes them lean towards creating those kinds of UI:s. Add to this the fact that good user interfaces tend to get invisible in use, and you have the recipe for choosing the option that’s easiest to implement and regarding things like autocompletion and keyboard shortcuts as frivolities, since they require more work. (I wish I knew how to turn off autocompletion in Outlook to make this point more clear to people.)

BTW, I think you should add some indication of required fields to this comment form.