What In Essence Is A Smart UI?

The best and smartest User Interfaces have two properties in common.  They allow for fine tuned through customization. Also they can learn to adapt and even optimize customizations according to statistics collected during usage by users.

Most  software I have encountered has no customization. This is a shortcomings of interfaces in most rich clients. Some examples to the contrary are worth listing

Some Customizations

1. Software from Kai in the early nineties would unlock features as the user gained in experience.
   The only drawback was when It was installed by an expert on a new machine it did not allow expert mode activation. Kai Software's required state of the art coding and design and did not really adapt to the users.
2. MS Word was never my favorite application but at one point Microsoft seemed to be on the right track.
   Even power users never require all of Word's feature and Microsoft allowed users to customise the UI.
   1. They started by giving a user the ability to customize the application's toolbars and menus.
   2. Word alsows users to  extend the software using maros, visual basic for applicaions and third party extensions.
   3. They allowed their menu items to fold some of their items so as to reduce the clutter of features
3. Windows 95 stopped displaying keyboard shortcuts (they were underlined) in menu
   These UI apper when an additional context is added i.e.  the Alt key is pressed.

Positive and Negative Feedback

Both these applications had created applications that allowed user customisation - either out of the box or based on a users choice.  However their application writers did not deem it necessary to use data they collect on their users to customise the UI or even the software behaviour. Yet common knowledge in marketing informs us that as markets mature competing producers develop better technology which allows them to profit by maufacutre highly customised goods which cater to nieches groups  representing smaller market slices.