[killercup]

> It ignores all of the important things that make usability good

Can you give some examples?

To me the approach presented here is not just about coming up with an initial design (where I agree there are more aspects to be considered), but iterating on existing design aspects (in this case language syntax and semantics) to make them more useable. Seeing the first dimension the author mentions is 'Applicability' it seems they pay attention to consistency, but I can see it is not explicitly mentioned.

[zzzcpan]

Basics for good design is to satisfy all: simplicity, flexibility, consistency, universality, familiarity. So users won't have to neither learn a lot to do something simple nor learn a lot for a lot of different cases, but intuitively reuse what they already learnt across all similar cases.

So, what can be made implicit is irrelevant, the proper question would be what can be done to improve user experience. And it's a lot, but the design by committee kind of process is going to work against it.