This misses some crucial observations. One, good UI takes time, even for experts. UI redesigns that are easily described can be hard to reprogram (e.g. “repla

This misses some crucial observations. One, good UI takes time, even for experts. UI redesigns that are easily described can be hard to reprogram (e.g. “replace those dialog elements with a table!” may mean switching to entirely different programming interfaces, there may be no sane data model that matches both without rework, and the new method may have new bugs). If your manager is asking you to finish something and move on, you need to make trade-offs. Two, historically there had been no serious shell in Windows environments for a very long time. When you have no other way to easily set a bunch of options, a crappy dialog that maps GUI elements directly to all possible options would have been a quick and practical way to expose all functions. I am not saying that these GUIs are good in any way but it makes perfect sense why they were created this way. Third, low-level interfaces such as the command line are an EQUALLY important part of all UI. A “design” should not just focus on how to rearrange some buttons. Low-level options for tweaking a program can help immensely to edit down what belongs in the GUI. On Mac OS X for example, it is really cool that one can use "defaults write" for a bunch of stuff because you can implement a lot of options without cramming them into your GUI. On a web site, a thoughtful layout for service URLs and JSON data formatting is far better than something that seems hastily-constructed and full of structural problems and other inconveniences. And also, this post is not showing convincing counter-examples. That “SiteNabber” redesign from part 3 is not really fixing the real issue. If you’re going to create a graphical replacement for a tool that deals with web sites, exposing “site url” to users is still broken. Why not make it a browser plug-in where you can simply view the web site you want, and click a toolbar button to save what you are looking at (or long-press that button for a menu that exposes a dialog version of the save with a few common options)?