I’m a coder. I have endusers – roughly 2 million of them. Do I think about them when I code? No, we pay an outstanding and invaluable person to do that – I incorporate her changes as I go along. I usually don’t question her changes because she’s the expert when it comes to UI and enduser experience. I just ran accross this thread from a KDE developer responding to this article from an endusers point of view.

Here’s a few choice quotes: “She raises many interesting points although I don’t think all recommendations
are that great. (Auto-disapearing menu-options? *yuck*) On the bright side,
we can pick the ones we do like :-)” and “I really wonder whether we should
waste CPU cycles on making the zooming more smooth.” The first one is just dumb – if enough users want it to justify coding it then do it and put it in the control panel for people to turn on/off as they please. The second one isn’t something I deal with often because I code applications for the web (therefore everything should be blazingly fast and we can’t program stuff that will bork our servers). On the desktop side of things it should be up to the user if they want to waste CPU cycles (afterall it’s the enduser’s CPU cycles not the developer’s that get wasted). This is another thing, if justified by enduser’s desires, should be added as an option to be turned off/on at will. This topic is a HUGE beef I have with OSS developers and one I’m guilt of as well.