Designed for Use

But Don’t Listen to Your Users Too Much

Writing about the people who still tell him that the Mac version of Microsoft Word 5.1 was the perfect version of the product,^[123] Microsoft’s Rick Schaut points out that if you ask these same people what they really want in a word processor, they almost always require at least one unusual, additional feature. It’s not just “Word 5.1,” it’s “Word 5.1 plus one feature.” But everybody has a different “plus one” feature, and if you add all of these additional features, Rick notes, you eventually arrive at the feature set of a modern Word version.

When your users envision your product, they envision a product that is tailor-made for them, a product where the features the product offers are exactly the features ...