Adaptive systems and methods for making software easy to use via software usage mining

A system for dynamically updating user accessible features of a software application on a client computer has a user interface, a local usage data file, and a data mining engine. The user interface is adapted to receive operator inputs. The local usage data file is adapted to store usage information corresponding to the operator inputs. The data mining engine is adapted to process the stored usage information and to generate local adjustments to a user interface of the software application based on the operator inputs. In one embodiment, a server is adapted to receive usage data from a plurality of application instances on a plurality of client computers and to generate global adjustments based on the received usage data. In one embodiment, the system has a merge feature adapted to blend and resolve conflicts between local and global adjustments to generate an interface adjustment for the user interface.