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The HCI Bibliography site has posted - on a shareware license - a full copy of Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction by Clayton Lewis and John Rieman.

Obviously, I haven’t read this yet, but in my “should-I-bookmark-this?” skim, I stopped to read the provocatively-titled The Worst Interface Ever and How It Came About in the Management Appendix. (Look at that title - I know you want to read that.)

This subheading details one of the classic mistakes of UI design and offers a genuinely funny case of design-by-programmer. Check this out:

After some discussion the developer explained the problem. This system ran on a type of terminal in which most keys produced input that was buffered in the terminal, but some special keys, including the function keys, communicated immediately with the host computer. The ENTER key was one of these special keys, and the developers had the bright idea of using it as an extra function key. They arranged the system so that when you hit ENTER you got whatever function was associated with the last function key you had pressed. Clayton and his partner were getting baffling results because in fooling around between attempts at their task they hit different function keys and hence set up different bindings for ENTER. The developer was surprised they hadn’t figured that out.