Side effects of developing for yourself →
Marco Arment, developer of Instapaper:
If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter.
I’ve mentioned my love for Instapaper for the iPhone and the Kindle before.
Personally, I struggle on product planning meetings when the mythical average user is invoked. In some companies - the user - is a defined entity, the result of market research and focus groups. While in others, it is more of a collection of anecdotes of friends, parents and grandparents, in addition to imaginary scenarios.
There is always the assumption that the developer is in a different league. As such, s/he cannot even comprehend what goes inside the mind of an user when presented with the browser. On the other hand, I’ve seen UI’s for features by developers that make me cringe.
The one rule I always try to keep is that: whoever is doing the grunt work, gets the final say.
