here's an example of bad design in an editorial workstation. The task is the most basic and frequent of all, to moderate a submitted news item:
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login - painless and standard procedure. cookies aid it.
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select Submission</em> - not obvious; it's the most common task for an editor, yet it's twelfth in the list of menu items, and 'logout' is the first (go figure). Why is Submission used to add stories to the lineup, but Add Story used to queue a submission?
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Select your story - the menu shows the submissions in order of receipt, the checkbox is to delete them in bulk, and you can click the email address, or click the title to go to the edit screen; nothing tells you, but to approve it, you have to go the the edit screen, but not the title or 'View' edit screen -- you have to know to use "edit as story". again, the most common task, and it's second last of 4 items, rendered in small font inconspicuously in the story line in the submission table. ok ...
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Edit/Comment - set the dept, modify any of the metadata or split the story, edit it or whatever. No spellcheck, no one-click to insert markup at the point, and if they'd submitted the story as text, it's rendered here with all the HTML in it, so your editor much be comfortable hand-editing HTML. There's an option for 'extended' as a data type for the story, but no mention what that means.
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Save - there's no actual 'save' option, because Save really means "Post" ... you can't edit and return to it later, you can only preview or post. If you've gone back to edit a story through submissions and the story was already posted, you get two of them posted.
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and then? ... - what does an editor do? They edit articles and decide what goes into the lineup. what does this thing do when you click "post"? it sends you to a list of posted articles. You can modify, preview or delete them. Nice, but ... what does an editor do? they get all the submissions and they edit them, but here, after each and ever one, you have to click back on Submissions on the main menu and start the sequence all over again.
Now, this is not to complain, it's just an illustration that we can do a lot better in matching software to the task if we match the software to the task, if we look at "how is this thing used?" rather than just feature-list "what should this thing do?" and splatter the interface with buttons and options. Oh, there were lots of other issues with phpSlash, not the least of which was the lack of a really, really simple template that someone could just extend (instead of having to delete so much just to get started), but there's also a lot of good work in there just screaming to get out ... if only the interface allowed it.
I'm going back to b2 ...