[sonofhans]

Fucking feels like that sometimes, eh? :D You’re right, though! The high end of this is something we rarely approach in software — an observer with a clipboard, sitting in a duck blind in someone’s living room for a week, watching them watch TV.

If you do this right you know your users better than they know themselves. I used to think that was a bullshit turn of phrase, but now I believe it completely. I frequently notice things about people and their work that they’ve never noticed before. There’s a real skill to “close observation from a distance.”