[tomgp]

I think there's something in this. Reading through the OP the "some of the mistakes we made" section struck me -- with a suitably plastic UI framework these would all be trivial to solve (simple paper prototyping would have shown some of these up right off the bat). The best-guess -> test-with-real-user -> iterate approach seems likely to be cheaper (in terms of effort) and more likely yield an interface that users want to use and as such one with which they are more easily able to achieve their aims.

That said, I'm not wholly against the idea of formally specified UIs and am glad people are putting thought into the area as really this shouldn't be either/or situation.

[johnm]

Hahaha! You must be working with folks (pm, dev, qa) that do a lot more than just hack away. Or perhaps I've just been working too much lately with big enterprises. :-(