Designing for Adaptation

Designing software for users without special requirements -- that is,
software you can't expect people to invest a great deal of time and
attention in learning --presents designers with an interesting set of
choices. Should you base your design very precisely on existing
applications, assuming that your users will already have the domain
knowledge and skill to use your product? Or should you build in some
different ideas, assuming that your users will already have the native
intelligence to adapt to what you know is a better approach to the
design problem than has been done before?

I'm basing this, of course, on the presumption that if you, as a
designer, have a different solution than has been tried before, it's
naturally a better solution.

The most common approach to this issue will be immediately obvious
when you survey the software market -- most software incorporated
little or no design innovation.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing; software user interfaces evolve,
after all, and it's possible that the current ubiquitous user
interface has evolved to be the best possible design solution. But
there's something particularly unsatsfying about that idea.

Designing something that people will adapt to -- interesting problem, no?