> "Instead of learning common conventions once, users learn everything afresh over and over again." Software interface design and HCI in general is a very youn

> "Instead of learning common conventions once, users learn everything afresh over and over again." Software interface design and HCI in general is a very young field. The web itself is a teenager. Now is not the time to start pushing to fossilise interaction conventions, because many of those we have right now are demonstrably bad and have been born of laziness and ignorance. As Isambard Brunel once said "I am opposed to the laying down of rules or conditions to be observed in the construction of bridges lest the progress of improvement tomorrow might be embarrassed or shackled by recording or registering as law the prejudices or errors of today." > "I'm talking about composability, think like pipes in a shell" This is in fact a very old idea in UI design, the last major push for concept based on it was a joint project between IBM, Apple and Microsoft called OpenDoc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc That effort became mired in technical difficulty, but even if it had overcome those issues, there would have still been a problem, which your ideal scenario leads to: that outside the F/LOSS world, software of any kind is essentially a platform to sell things on. And to get investment, forecast sales and generally plan ahead, you need to make sure that the use of your software is predictable. This is why open APIs and things like Facebook Apps have had a rough history. The minute users start hacking out their own features or making a tragedy of the commons, then things get difficult for the participating companies. They are forced to respond by shutting down that behaviour or bring it within their own platform as new functions. For this reason, we will never see significant scenarios such as "'Credit Card App, pipe the list of charges that I've tagged with 'corporate' into Concur and file expense reports for each one'." Maybe in F/LOSS, in which case I suggest you join Richard Stallman. So as I said before I think you are idealistically on the right lines - UIs are in general awful, and for reasons that their designers often cannot recognise or appreciate. The discipline of UX design in particular is extremely immature, is populated largely by idiots (I know, for I am one of them). It learns very little from its mistakes. For example, Bruce Tognazzini's design principles are barely ever observed, his findings of fundamental user interface issues over 30 years ago have yet to make it into mainstream design at all. This is despite many designers professing to be familiar with the work of Don Norman and others in this field. in the end, Design has been hijacked by the desire to create an emotional reaction, to be "visual" and to regard usability as suspect if it counters those desires. Those are, I think, the real problem. Yours is fundamentally a technical approach to counter this. But it's the wrong one.