[Neputys]

In that sense, personally, everyone cares. But when people have to operate in big org environments priorities change. Think about it, no one wakes up in the morning and thinks I'm going to make something terrifyingly hard to use today. No one invests or gives grants for something that "is going to be terrifyingly hard to use", right? And yet dominating majority of big org software is terrifyingly hard to use. The answer to why? I think is the point you are missing. Your suggestion is commendable, interesting but no number of references or examples are going to help make your next project better as well as that why.

As far as UI/UX world goes it has a problem of becoming fashionable, popular and somewhat profitable. This always attracts certain kinds of people and hot air. I'm sure you have plenty of your own examples in academia.

[xipho]

I'm admit I'm not totally clear as to your point. If it is that software is terrible because it's not accountable to its users then yes, I agree, this is often one of the reasons why.

In our case our group is funded primarily by an endowement. We use (dogfood) our own software, therefor we are accountable to ourselves. We are also developing it for our friends, collaborators, and other scientists who have traditionally not had access to the types of tools we work on, we are accountable to them. The bits that exist are because our users need them, have co-designed them, and have given us a ton of feedback as to how to iteratively improve them. We don't have to sell ($) them a product (yes, we understand there are long term issues with growth, support, and sustainability that will take hard work to deal with).

We're fortunate enough to have time to think and engage with concepts that startups that must have to sell products must master, thus we can "dream" about what game interfaces might bring to the table.