The blind spot
When you develop an application, you get to know it intimately. You and you alone are aware of all it’s intricacies, you are the god in the details. But there’s a problem with that: you’re the expert, the super-user. Your users on the other hand, are beginners. Truely understanding them, is an art in itself; they are much more naive than you could probably imagine. So when you meticulously build an application, there’s a big risk of developing a blind spot for user experience.
As a result, many applications don’t live up to their full potential. Good solutions remain unused, important innovations don’t reach their users and developers can become frustrated. How much annoyance is caused by a small inefficiency that is experienced daily by millions of users? How many beautiful ideas are lost because developers focus to much on realizing functionality instead of on relaying this functionality to the psychology of the user?
The human way
Just as you need to take into account human anatomy when designing a chair, when building an application you need to take into account the way a human sees, perceives, processes information and reacts.
Despite unprecedented possibilities to apply knowledge of user psychology and behavior during the development phase, the blind spot for user needs is still rampant. Too many developers are not capable of really taking them into account. Not only because of the super-user effect, but also because of limited knowledge of human perception and psychology in general. Finally, it may be possible to gather massive amounts of data about your user group. But proper analysis and finding useful patterns demands expertise that is not always readily available.
User pleasure
It’s our dream that developers will enjoy the benefits of understanding users. When users will attain a more central position in development, we believe the world will see better tools, developers will flourish more and potentially brilliant software innovations will realize their full potential. When user pleasure grows, use itself will grow.