Walk a Mile in Their Shoes
Oh! How so many of the world’s software problems would be solved by listening to this nugget of wisdom from yesterday’s posting by Jacob Nielsen!
Of course, people don’t want to hear me say that they need to test their UI. And they definitely don’t want to hear that they have to actually move their precious butts to a customer location to watch real people do the work the application is supposed to support. The general idea seems to be that real programmers can’t be let out of their cages. My view is just the opposite: no one should be allowed to work on an application unless they’ve spent a day observing a few end users.
Software exists to solve problems. To understand the problems a proposed software application is supposed to solve, nothing beats walking a mile in the user’s shoes. (37signals calls this What’s Your Problem? in their book Getting Real.)
