September 19th, 2005

A new way of driving application development

It hit me right between the eyes - one of those "Duh!" moments. So obvious when you read it, but it took such inspiration to write in the first place.

I am referring to the blog entry "Listening to users considered harmful?" In this article Kathy Sierra makes the point that while users can drive incremental changes to a software application, they are not capable of driving breakthrough improvements. This is because they have no way of asking for something they have never conceived of. To quote Kathy: "This is about giving them what they really DO want... but simply don't realize it because they had no way to imagine it." Go and read the article. If you are in software development this will open your eyes...