You Are Not Your Users

Here’s something that most geeks don’t think about. As a contract programmer,
you HAVE to do this thinking; it’s part of what you bring to the table.

Excerpts from ‘You Are Not Your Users’ by Douglas Reilly:

Recently, I was at the Microsoft Mobilized Developers Conference (MDC) where
David S. Platt (author of The Microsoft Platform Ahead) spoke about the Pocket
PC Phone and why it might not set the world on fire despite the fact that most
of the developers at the conference thought it was very cool.

By way of example, he asked for a show of hands of those people at the
conference that drove a car with manual transmission. Perhaps 40 percent of the
crowd raised their hand. He then asked how many did not drive a car with manual
transmission, but would if their spouse/significant other would let them. I
would guess an additional 20 percent of hands went up. He then reminded us that
in the U.S., only about 10 percent of cars are sold with manual transmissions.
So, when it comes to drivers, we developers at that conference were not even
remotely representative of the general population. He perfectly crystallized
this example by saying, “You Are Not Your Users!” [Full article here]