I'm really happy to read (and to echo) Andy McKay's call for Plone developers to pay more attention to building high-quality user interfaces that make configuring Plone and its add-on Products easy.

Some people may think of them as meaningless chrome or bling, but in the end they do what users want. They take all the underlying bits and peices and make a simple radio button out of some logical choices.

The code and the technology behind it is probably quite boring to anyone interested in Plone.

It's not boring to me.  A huge amount of Plone's value is the fact that it makes it insanely easy for non-technical end-users to get their work done.  That's because the Plone core has been given a tremendous amount of UI lovin' by Limi, et al.  But unfortunately, many add-on Products haven't been given similar attention.  Alan briefly touched on this the other day:

... Plone's aim should be the Macintonish of Content Management Systems.  We have had blind people give us input, human computer interaction experts, lots of end user feedback.  We absorb this feedback and put it into Plone.  But there is so much more we could do. 

Alan then asks:

What about the usability guys stepping up to the plate?  The usability guys use blogs.  They use Plone.  They use Poll's.  Why dont they work with the authors of the package to make them better?

Usually the usability guys cannot write software.  Why don't they ask plone-users or #plone for help to FIX the usability of a add-on component? Even better why don't Add-on developers ask usability people for help?  

Here's one idea that might help:  Alan wrote a piece a while back called "How to Add Your Configlets to the Plone Control Panel"  But there's nothing that explains how to actually write a configlet in the first place.  Maybe that's why so few products have 'em.  What about a follow-up: "How To Write Configlets For Your Product." 

UPDATE: Maybe I should search the Plone documentation site before I spout off.  If I had I would have found Alan's how-to Add Configlets for own Product's-Settings.

Another usability connection that the San Francisco Plone Crowd might want to look into is AspirationTech's work on open-source usability.  They did their first "extreme usability" sprint for open-source developers in August, and I don't know what they've got planned for the future, but it might well be worthwhile to connect with 'em.

Finally, a question:  which Products do you think are most in need of a usability review and/or some configuraiton options?