Just found this website on poor interface design, and general bad microsoft advice on how to design poor interfaces. And as if we needed any more reason to mock windows...

Anyhow, the info on the site is actually rather good, and something which even OS developers should take a note of. I know that GNOME have a project devoted to it, does anyone else know of anymore OS usability projects?

Probably not the answer you're waiting for."Why Free Software usability tends to suck" (also note "Why Free Software usability tends to suck even more") gives some arguments on causes for bad UI Design. Because of some of the reasons given there (mostly money) you won't find many UID/HCI subprojects within OSS projects but more on the commercial side of it all. For example the Gnome usability study was funded by SUN, IBM has pieces in its developerWorks part of the site (excellent part on why MacOS X suxxx major) and then there's lotsa consultancy firms around, for various reasons I still like the mercyless papersby Jakob Nielsen.

kde has something similar http://usability.kde.org/