"be surprising yet self-evident" - Walter Murch

This is a follow-up to yesterday's ultra-fast release cycles and the new plane post. Being an advocate for NOT responding to every user feature request, I have tried to parse Skyler's words carefully.

She said, "myspace keeps doing what everybody really wants..."
She did NOT say, "what everybody asks for."

She said, "... as soon as you think of something, it's in there."
She did NOT say, "as soon as you ask for something, it's in there."

These distinctions are crucial!

To me, this implies that the developers are figuring out what people want as much (if not more) from watching and anticipating behavior as from taking specific feature requests.

To Skyler, it seems to feel that myspace is anticipating what the next natural thing might be based on the current state of how the software/community is being used. In other words, users may not know that they want something, but as soon as change A occurs, change B becomes obvious (at least to the developers) as the next natural thing.

The organic, natural, evolution of the software and the community seems very important and again--this isn't about responding instantly to user feature requests. Of course, this sounds like we (developers) have to be telepathic to figure out what they really want, and perhaps that's part of the point. We need to become mind-readers (virtually) rather than "yes men" to our users.

Jason Fried makes a big point of the fact that they (37signals) are users of their own software, and that they are in as good a position as anyone to recognize what is--and is not--important. He claims that people may believe a certain feature is really important, but it turns out that when they're using the system themselves, they realize that is just doesn't matter.

The Threadless guys said the same thing--that as developers, being RIGHT smack in the middle of the demographic of their users has really helped them. One of the guys (can't recall which one) did acknowledge that his ability to really understand what's going on will probably diminish as he gets older and farther away from the age/culture of his users (assuming the demographic stays the same).

So there is a huge challenge for developers/authors/teacher like myself who are creating for people who are younger than we are. And the same is true if we are developing for any user group we are not a part of and don't understand at the celluar level.

I'll leave you with a quote from Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch, which we try to apply when we're writing our books. I think it applies equally well to software:

"Your job is to anticipate... To give them what they want and/or what they need just before they have to "ask" for it--to be surprising yet self-evident at the same time. If you are too far behind, or too far ahead of them, you create problems, but if you are right with them, leading them ever so slightly, the flow of events feels natural and exciting at the same time."