When building a product, it sure helps to not assume anyone's intelligence. Even better, assuming everyone is insane helps you consider more cases where user behavior could cause an issue. Ultimately, that saves time.
FWIW, I took my friend’s advice all the way through founding a company and building a product. I disagree about assuming everyone is insane for building a product. The more helpful way to approach this is that everyone has legitimate needs and hopes for your software, but that they are overwhelmingly different from each other. Your job is to translate and prioritize the many legitimate wishes and expectations into something that will maximize the number of people you serve.
Assuming your customers are not intelligent or that they are insane is going to prevent you from being able to empathize with what they think they want, and it’s going to make it harder for you to translate what they want into features you should build. The assume-the-worst approach can also make you come off as tone-deaf, if you never accept and never understand what people are asking for.
Assuming that user behavior can cause certain issues is a valuable angle to consider, I agree with you there, but that viewpoint needs to feed back into the product as a question about whether you actually designed your product for people who don’t know how your product was built. If the product is fine, then it needs to question whether you have sufficient training of your product. Ultimately, it needs to question your assumptions, not your customers. Assuming people are insane is going to act as a force against understanding why your product isn’t perfect.
Arguably both of the viewpoints are correct and market goes into different swings depending on where you are in history. What if we are at the cusp of the swing back to high customised products after Apple and Google had been pushing highly top-down non-customer-oriented products-that-think-for-you upon us for at least a decade now?
(Sorry for the long post, I’m trying to explain but editing lazily. It’d be more concise if I had more time.)
I’m not sure, what are you suggesting that it changes if apps become more customized or more customer oriented? Wouldn’t that only make understanding the users’ expectations and not writing them off as ridiculous even more important?
I’m not entirely sure what you mean, like why the state of design of Google or Apple apps has much bearing on how to approach what you assume about customers - apart from the fact that it’s really helpful to understand the ecosystem of software and the UX elements that people have become accustomed to. Yes it’s harder to design phone apps that behave in fundamentally different ways or using fundamentally different interaction models than what people are used to. You might understand your idea is superior to what Google did, but when people reject it, that doesn’t mean people are insane, it means the opposite, that there’s a good reason for their expectations and that you and I might be insane for trying to fight the tide.
I’m also not sure what it means to be “correct” about assuming people are insane. But to be clear, my argument is not that it’s incorrect, my argument is that it’s not helpful or constructive, and it can prevent you from self-reflection or improvement in a harmful way. Assuming people are insane is to reject a reasonable explanation, it’s a very (ironically) lazy way to rationalize not trying to understand.
Under normal circumstances, with average people, people have expectations that are completely reasonable and come from a history of their experiences. If you assume they’re insane, what you’re really doing is willfully closing your own eyes to their context and shutting yourself off from seeking out what they want.
It’s important to realize that people doing wacky things with your product is a result of differing expectations, and explore the sources of this discrepancy. Inside the gap there are a variety of reasons that include failure of the app builder to clearly state their expectations. If too many people are doing seemingly silly things, it might mean you haven’t made clear who your app is really for, and what it can or can’t do. Assuming you’ve done everything you can do, explained everything about your product clearly, assuming that it can’t be improved and that someone using it wrong is just crazy, that’s a pretty bad assumption and rarely if ever “correct”.
Assuming your customers are not intelligent or that they are insane is going to prevent you from being able to empathize with what they think they want, and it’s going to make it harder for you to translate what they want into features you should build. The assume-the-worst approach can also make you come off as tone-deaf, if you never accept and never understand what people are asking for.
Assuming that user behavior can cause certain issues is a valuable angle to consider, I agree with you there, but that viewpoint needs to feed back into the product as a question about whether you actually designed your product for people who don’t know how your product was built. If the product is fine, then it needs to question whether you have sufficient training of your product. Ultimately, it needs to question your assumptions, not your customers. Assuming people are insane is going to act as a force against understanding why your product isn’t perfect.