I have been working with desktop, web, and mobile applications for a long time. And several times in my career I actually built them. In the early days of desktop application development Apple, Microsoft, Sun, NeXT, etc all had manuals on their operating system's human interface design program. I still have a few of these manuals and other guidebooks on my shelves. Not that I use them anymore. And, it seems, neither have many UX partitioners read them as part of their education. I recently made the suggestion that we should add ellipsis to menu items to indicate to the user that a modal would be presented to collect more information before the action was taken. The response was that they had never see this before and had not heard of it either.
For many young UX professions they have spent their entire lives working with non-desktop applications. Applications that each define a unique user experience. The drive for uniqueness belies the other efforts at efficiency and intuitiveness. It is likely too late to reintroduce common HCI guidelines, but, hopefully, UX professionals will start to take an interest in the history of their profession.
Update: Maybe it is me being stuck in the past....
