This is a well known problem in cognitive systems engineering, which sometimes seem to promote design which might seem backwards to an interaction designer focu

This is a well known problem in cognitive systems engineering, which sometimes seem to promote design which might seem backwards to an interaction designer focused on creating for everyday consumption. You don't want to design the control room for a nuclear reactor like you design a webpage, because you can under no circumstances sacrifice correctness for ease. A lot of times, it's about making the wrong thing really hard to do, with multiple layers of fail-safes. The potential gain in productivity when designing for ease is vastly overshadowed by the risks associated with making an error. When we're not talking about nuclear reactors, but—for example—statistics, where consequences are abstract, it might get tempting to err on the side of ease. In fact, any domain you don't understand well enough well tempt you to design for ease over correctness. Ideally, the designer should understand the domain at hand well enough to create a design that makes it easy to be correct, and hard to make an error. There's a lot of stuff out there that has been neither designed for ease nor correctness, however, but which has a design arbitrarily dictated by the table layout of a database, or some other random technical constrain that has nothing to do with the problem domain.