If you try to make everyone happy, you’ll end up making no one happy.
This goes back to yesterday’s post of keeping it simple but it’ s worth having as a rule twice over.
It’s important to understand that human psychology plays a significant role in building any online system. You have, on one-hand, the user. On the other hand you have the designer. Depending on the specification process these two sides have very different desires.
The user desires to make their life as simple as possible while extracting as much value as possible to pass along to their customers. The developer desires to build a tool that will reach as large an audience as possible while making money along the way.
The more you align the design to the desires of the user, the more you limit your prospective audience. This serves also to alienate any current users that use the system in ways that don’t align with new functionality. Ultimately, taking too much user input leads you down a path of targeting 1 user. It’s important to play the role of editor.