[dudeman13]

Ah, I meant for the programmer to empathize with the user.

If you have people dedicated to those roles, they should be the ones that decide what to do by default. As such, programmers don't really need to care about the user at all (although they can)

Specs come in, software comes out :)

[saynay]

I feel like you need a balance there. If your programmers cannot put themselves in the shoes of the users at all, you need really really good specs. If they can, your specs don't need to be as... specific, as you can rely more on the programmers to make reasonable design decisions.