RIP Steve Jobs

A visionary passed away today - Steve Jobs left this world at the young age of 56. The NY Times had a great article on his life and legacy.
I found this part of the article to be particularily interesting ---
"He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Regis McKenna, a longtime Silicon Valley marketing executive to whom Mr. Jobs turned in the late 1970s to help shape the Apple brand, said Mr. Jobs’s genius lay in his ability to simplify complex, highly engineered products, “to strip away the excess layers of business, design and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.”

Mr. Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Mr. Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”"

It's amazing to hear that Mr. Jobs relied on his intuition to guide his decision making process, even when it put him at odds with others. It takes a lot of moral courage to do that, especially when it feels like you are alone in standing up. On my last project at work, I noticed that the team was grossly misaligned with end user representatives being the ones indirectly designing the product since we had no designers. The verbalized rationale for not having designers was "there is no funding" although I suspect there were political factors at play - unfortunately, in my experience, software development in Defense is often dictacted by end user needs/wants instead of "being informed" by these needs...products end up being designed/developed incorrectly, which leads to increased user frustration and a greater desire for control.

The reality is users have no idea of what they want. If someone asked me "what features would you want your car to have" or "what is your ideal tv like," I would certainly provide some answers however those answers may not lead to development of a car or tv that truly suits my needs. A better approach would be for a designer or analyst to observe me using a tv or a car (as captured in the contextual inquiry method) so that he/she can identify common tasks I do, and see where the bottlenecks are...however, I have yet to see this process applied in Defense which is kind of strange since its fairly standard.