Reading Alan Cooper's "About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design" made a big impression on me; UI work is really fascinating and rewarding, but it is honoured almost exclusively in the breach thesedays. I can understand companies knocking up intranet based applications for limited internal use cost-cutting, but in many cases these are massive corporations rolling out atrocious UIs to the public.

Part of the problem imo is that everyone thinks "how hard can it be?" and that they have good ideas for UI design. They therefore aren't interested in reading Cooper or submitting their brainwaves to even peer scrutiny.