These days we're all engineers with more and more people (subliminally?) aware of the importance 'function' plays in the better products of today. We've all had enough 'digital-years' of PCs, mobile phones, PDAs etc. to realise that the 'beauty' of a product is often it's function as much as it's form. Now we're able to sell this functionality 'above-the-line' as an integral part of the experience. I liked this post:

"Guess what the major selling point of iPod is...organize your tunes by artist, album, genre, etc... It's a $400 device with cutting-edge design, but the thing they seem to think is the biggest selling point is how easily it organizes your songs. It occurred to me that we are, indeed, not just representing a skill set that is for propeller-heads and anal-retentives. If Apple is harping on the IA of an embedded OS in a high-end consumer device, then IA is indeed a very hip, market-essential Thing To Do. "

http://www.info-arch.org/hypermail/sigia-l/0201/0323.html (via Peterme.com)

I agree with Jared's assertions at that talk about how far web design still has to go to be considered successful. And I agree with him about the main reason -- the absence of a feedback loop, that teaches designers what was successful and what wasn't.

>Compare that with buying something from a shop - it is
>unthinkable.

But I did find his "buying from a shop" analogy somewhat misleading. Buying from a shop is enormously simplified by familiarity, i.e. having done the same thing thousands of times already. Can you remember how intimidating an experience it was when you were six years old?

>Can anyone in this forum point to work that proves
>(objectively) significant improvements in design?

Hard to say, since as time goes on we also become more and more used to the web, so our reference point moves. Personally, my own experience of on-line shopping is more and more simplified by repeated encounters with certain bits of functionality that are becoming standard.

But at the same time, as I read recently in another article, the problem is increasing as the number of novice internet users are constantly increasing. Every day, more and more new users are discovering the internet for the first time. And every day, I get more and more out of touch with them. This is a job for... user-testing!