If you have a system design that requires the operator to make 20 decisions in the back end in order to accomplish a task, don’t complain the guys building the front-end user interface that the user interface requires too many decisions.

The only thing the UI guys can do is either (1) hide the decisions that don’t need to be made (though if you’re asking for decisions that don’t need to be made, WTF?), (2) present the decisions in a way which is easier to understand.

But if you have 20 decisions that have to be made, no amount of UI goodness is going to reduce the effort of making 20 decisions.

So if you want a simpler UI, reduce the decisions that are required by the system.