Followup
You know what? I’m wrong a lot. Big surprise, I know. But, dang it, this time I am not wrong.
I am a software company, ’k? And you are a Captain of Industry. I come to you with two proposals. The first runs thus:
“I want to send an anthropologist/ethnologist/usability expert/tester/developer to your company for a week. This person needs to have full access to your most productive employees—which means watching them like a hawk, distracting them, hauling them out of production to run them through rat-mazes, and training them on software that may never hit the market. And, um, we’re going to compensate you for their lost productivity with, um, maybe better software down the road?”
The second runs thus:
“This is our employee, John. We want you to use his services for six months as an assistant or apprentice. You need pay John nothing—we pay him—and naturally he will sign appropriate NDAs so that your trade secrets remain intact. We just want him to learn the ropes here, so we can use what he learns to make better software for companies like yours.”
If I were a Captain of Industry, I bloody well know which offer I’d take. And as I’ve already said, I’d put my money on that approach ending up with better software. As far as I know, though, nobody is making that kind of offer.
Burningbird’s point about her own background is well taken, but I note she isn’t making, say, point-of-sale software for restaurants. I think she should be; the POS systems I’ve seen are pretty regularly awful.
It’s a question of studying from outside versus learning from inside. Maybe I’m just too hands-on for my own good, but I bet on the latter over the former every time. Don’t just “talk to” the users. Be one.