this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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This is really important and often underemphasized. People don't reflect on why they feel they want X or Y. We don't know if it's some objective reason or a product of an arbitrary decision some other software maker taught us. Famous example for this is pinch-to-zoom. The first people who tried it on the iPhone found it seriously unintuitive and even difficult. Apple spent a lot of effort teaching people to pinch-to-zoom. Then you have the case where we don't even know what we might like if we haven't experienced it. The do-what-people-want mantra runs into these and other rrlated problems and projects that live by it often aren't the best things out there. Good projects typically do a mix of both. Human-computer interaction / UX are legitimate research disciplines for a reason and they've yielded very useful heuristics to produce better software.
Requirements gathering is really really difficult, and its why I am currently not worried about an LLM taking my job.
For my work, I had a project where the requirements were gathered for us, which stated that A was completely forbidden, but X, Y and Z were required. We developed to that spec, released it, and it turned out that the users actually needed A all along. We added A, and now A is the only feature they use... Shame, because X, Y and Z were cool features, and I was really proud of them, but a complete waste of time developing them.
Absolutely true.