
The nice thing about GUIs is that there are so many to choose from. And everybody has an opinion about them. Particularly UI experts, who are always ready to point to things that any particular GUI does wrong. Even the platform developers themselves are prone to keep redesigning things from time to time. And then not even following their own rules. There was a famous map of the New York subway, released in 1972 <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/arts/design/the-subway-map-that-rattled-new-yorkers.html>, that represented the network in such a stylized fashion that the city’s residents got mightily confused. Was it the people’s fault? Was the designer’s brilliance simply misunderstood? Sometimes I think UI designers themselves lose track of how users actually do things outside their labs...