Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Here’s a post from Innovations that nails it. It’s a discussion on Las Vegas, but the closing comments say it all, whether you’re designing a casino, a user interface, or services:

But our opinion doesn’t matter. What matters is the opinion of the customer, and it’s easy to marginalize or ignore that perspective in favor of seeing what we want to see. This is particularly true in technology product development, I believe, where the skill levels of the developers are leagues ahead of those of their ultimate customers. That’s one reason why software designers continue to add features to products when customers don’t use 80% of the features they already have. … Good product design means setting aside your biases and thinking like the customer, whether or not the customer is like you.

Well said.