The gist: not only do people build mental models to interact with the world, but they also derive such models from the world, and the model becomes a person's understanding of the world's inner workings, and it's complexity. And this is where design in general, industrial design in particular, and UI design in the very particular comes in.
I can really identify with this. A poor UI will drive user's thought processes. Kind of like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity). When new users come into the organization, their thoughts are shaped by the program used to do the job.
Unfortunately at this stage no one seems to really know the business processes, and the software now dictates the process (even when incorrect). It's quite a struggle.
I certainly bet it's a large struggle. The costs to redesign (based on the real business process), implement, and train users on the new system would be incredibly large. This is another reason to get things correct in the requirements analysis when designing the original software. Unfortunately a lot of software out there either didn't have that process or didn't do it well - much of our software is based on the process that was optimized for a paper-based system.
Does anyone have any experience with optimizing processes like this or data about those costs?
This rings very true. UI shapes thought, in the same way that language has been shown to. I wonder in what subtle ways our understanding of how computers work has been shaped by the way we structure command line arguments, or the existence of windows and mouse pointers? Will the iPhone/iPad produce a new generation of computer users who think about software, in the same way that web apps have (arguably) done?
