Mimi and I were checking out Things the other day, which appears to be a thoughtfully designed task manager for OSX (similar space to Chandler). One of the developers had a recent post that I thought captured something important about good design:

Of course both Jobs and Schiller know that there are times when you listen to users and times you better not. And the interesting thing is, even when developers don’t listen, they might do it for the best of their users. But how is that?

By all means developers need to follow their vision without asking anybody. They need to think out of the box and innovate. How else could they surprise and ultimately delight?

One of the main responsibilities of a developer is to keep guard over the gestalt of a program. It is all too easy to let your application burst into a universe of hardly connected little features. We have all seen it happen. But it is equally easy to ignore your customers’ needs and to embark on a journey where nobody is following you.

It is not about listening or not, it is about what to do with all the things you have learned from listening. And that is integration. The best feature is worth nothing when not integrated properly. When we read a feature request, we don’t think about doing it or not doing it. After all, if software development is not about satisfying users, then what is it? We are thinking about how we could nicely integrate it with the rest of the application without diluting its identity.

Of course, as an open project, we’ve sort of given up the element of surprise.

One of the project goals has been to experiment with involving users, developers, and other interested parties throughout the design process, making design decisions in conversations on public mailing lists. During that process it can be tempting to use “what the user has asked for” as an objective criteria for making decisions. The quote above does a nice job articulating that doing so can be dangerous for the integrity of a design, without writing off the importance of paying attention to what users are saying.

Mimi did a writeup on OSAF’s open design process last summer in preparation for a presentation she did with Ted Leung at OSCON. She goes into some detail describing how we manage conversations and make design decisions in a way that tries to preserve both the “gestalt” of the design as well as the continued interest of developers who might be pursing individual passions and concerns. Getting this process right continues to be one of the more interesting challenges of the project.