One area I have been looking at are "business rules" systems which, I think, won't go mainstream until they get facile enough that you can do more ordinary programming tasks with them.
A core idea of them has been that the things that make coding hard for business people are different from the things that make coding hard for programmers and I don't believe that at all. (If programmers can't stand to use it to do simple things, how do you expect business people to go anywhere with it?)
Overly "helpful" systems are adopted by people who don't bother to learn the domain before they make sweeping business decisions. And, strangely, once people do know the domain the last thing they want is a kindergarten toy where they program by clicking through menus. Imagine a novelist writing by navigating right-click menus of phrases organized by "Prepositional phrases", "Snappy responses", etc.
It's not that a GUI can't be helpful, it's that "GUI" isn't a synonym for helpful.
If there's a problem that can be solved by looking at a map (perhaps dataflow through components) then yes, it'd be great to present that visually.
The problem is that most of the people having this discussion know programming from movies like Hackers. They want a picture of an oil-tanker rolling over despite the fact that the code in question (theoretical code - never shown in the movie) wouldn't know what an oil tanker was, it'd simply react to one number changing by changing another. The meaning is all dependent on what platform it's installed on.
It is not easy to make GUI systems that are easy to use. Back before people were used to reading help on the internet there used to be a brisk market in 1000 page books with titles like "How to use Microsoft Word".
Closer to the domain my favorite example of malware is the ontology editor protoge. Every day I see freshers who are highly confused getting started with protoge who are then blown away with how easy it is to write an RDFS ontology in a few lines of Turtle with an ordinary text editor.
IMO, K2 really has a good entry in the business rules engine problem with a solid, kinda-accessible UI.
I am confident, having scoped many a project, that often the case is the stakeholder not quite knowing what they want. A good UI then is a good step forward to allowing the stakeholder to iterate on refining their interpretation of their own problem.
I just went to the k2 website and it looks like I can't get access to the software without buying it? Bummer. I set up a request asking for a demo, but dealing with sales reps is such a PITA.
I am in the market for a decent BPM that doesn't want to charge crazy amounts and forcing us to buy support (I'm looking at you, Bonitasoft). Right now we're using Activiti it is awful. It also seems like the least bad of the FOSS offering.
I only dealt with K2 in '10, so things may have changed, but even in the sales process they had engineers on the line. One of the better 'sales' experiences IMO.
Oh, and if you are genuinely interested in trying K2 before buying, I'll be they'd set up a VM for you to remote into. They did for me in '10.
A core idea of them has been that the things that make coding hard for business people are different from the things that make coding hard for programmers and I don't believe that at all. (If programmers can't stand to use it to do simple things, how do you expect business people to go anywhere with it?)