Everyone is an above-average driver

Christina Wodtke offers the blessings of Information Architecture to software design:

After hunting for "check spelling" in Adobe InDesign, Macromedia Dreamweaver and MS Word, I can tell you a little IA in software design would go a long way. And I never know what I'm going to find when I look under the "file" menu, beyond "save."

It's always tempting for brilliant amateurs, having mastered one corner of a field, to jump on some real or imagined oversight. Information Architects know hierarchies, and so extending this expertise to application menus seems straightforward.

Life isn't that simple.

First, menus aren't that important. Regular users learn to use menus quickly, good and bad alike. Occasional users are occasional users; your menus, however ill-conceived, can't waste much of their time because you don't have much of their time in the first place. It's easy to imagine yourself moving menus around, but harder to envision getting your hands in the code; this means that everyone thinks they could design better menus. Good design moves the menu items where they belong, great design sometimes eliminates them entirely.

Second, the answer is not clear. If your application is a text editor, then spell checking might be part of editing and belong on the Edit menu. But, if the spell checker is a dialog, you might think of the spell checker as a special machine to which you bring your work to be processed, checked, and folded. In that case, perhaps spell checking belongs on a Tools menu. If your application only concerns text peripherally or part time, spell checking might belong on a Text menu. If spelling is an exotic concern (as it might be in an editor for programmers) but your application does a lot of search, then perhaps it belongs on the Search menu, alongside searches for bookmarks, syntax errors, and section headings.

It's easy to convince yourself (or some managers) that designers are clowns. The real work, though, is to understand what the design is trying to do, to analyze it with sympathy and clarity, and then (perhaps) to show how it could have been better.