I think it is rarely a tradeoff of happiness. Most of the time it is about finding out what the right thing is and then doing it and explaining it well. I thin

I think it is rarely a tradeoff of happiness. Most of the time it is about finding out what the right thing is and then doing it and explaining it well. I think the reason why it often isn't done like that is twofold. First, there are many incompetent, sloppy developers who just don't care. Second, users are unwilling to pay for the time it takes a competent, unsloppy developer to do the work properly. For instance, it is not impossible to design an address entry form that accepts unusual but correct addresses and at the same time captures as much structure as possible. Not impossible, but surprisingly difficult if you think about it. You would think that it's economic rationality that leads to sloppy design and hence to the need for free form text fields. Maybe it just doesn't make sense to design everything with great care? But I don't think that is true. 90% of the time I needed to phone in to a support line was about issues that a slightly better website could have provided easily. Bad software costs them hugely in terms of support and user satisfaction. It's plain to see that the good companies do get their data entry fields right and bad ones don't. I bet you could even predict share prices of companies based on the quality of their most trivial data entry forms.