[omarhegazy]

Not bogging down your service with unneeded features is a feature in it of itself. And often times the best feature.

Also, ditto with it not being the rule that customers know what's best. Customers are for the most part good judges of their own happiness, but it's a heuristic, not a hard-and-fast rule : take it with a grain of salt. If you know what you're doing, you, as the designer of the product, should know more about it than the user, the layman who uses the product, so you know what'll be the best in the long term better than the user.

But another thing about being the designer of the product is that you spend so much time with it you start staring at it from a millimeter away, losing sight on the grand purpose. It's something you can't prevent even if you're aware of it; as the artist, it's your job to focus on detail. It's why programmers initially thought Dropbox was just "rsync and ftp with a neat UI, what's the big deal?". The more you focus on detail, the less you focus on the big picture, which is an important perspective to have -- which is why it's also important to keep tabs on what the user says h/she wants.

They hated the News Feed when it was originally released and they shat on the iPad when it originally came out.

But they also thought OK Soda would be a good idea.

Maintain a balance.