First, software should be efficient to use. Too many designers, maybe a majority, make "beautiful" software that is a pain to use. Are forms today better than

First, software should be efficient to use. Too many designers, maybe a majority, make "beautiful" software that is a pain to use. Are forms today better than they used to be? I don't think so. Most "web based" or "web inspired" apps today are slow, unintuitive, and have idiosyncratic behavior. How often have you had a form that didn't work right because some Javascript request failed and/or it decided your entry wasn't correct? How often did tabbing through fields actually work as you expected? While your statement is technically correct, it leads to software that just isn't a joy to use. We get used to having bad usability, and we take for granted that forms just don't work 100% and so we take the safe route - for example writing long text in an editor and copy-and-pasting to be sure. Have you never done this? Having beautiful interfaces is nice, but it should be an afterthought and not a priority. Because it is difficult to optimize everything at the same time, and beauty is lexicographically unimportant compared to efficiency.