No, I'm trying to argue that you are using wrong logic by name-calling religious axioms. You're assuming that every religious axiom is necessarily illogical, which is the Begging the question fallacy.
As a warm-up exercise you may want to try a much simpler problem: find at which point you do disagree with Descartes in his perfectly logical proof that God exists, preferably by reading his own Meditations (3 and 5 are the ones about God).
Now don't be too rude to the old man, we have about 300 more years of philosophy in hindsight.;-) This particular analysis was specially helpful to me when learning about rationality.
My point is that atheism is the only logical position, as you have to suspend logic in order to believe otherwise
Your point is logically flawed, since there exist logical ways to have beliefs different than atheism. See my other post here.
God and religion have no evidence, reproducable and observable experiments, just old books and stories. To believe in such a thing requires a suspension of logic
This is a non-sequitur. Not logically sound. That argument can be proven false by finding a logical belief system that supports the existence of God.
One particular way to do that is to assume as evidence of God facts that you wouldn't accept as evidence of God because of your own chosen axioms. But if you start from different axioms the same evidence would make a logically valid belief system.
as I've said, one has to debate those points, otherwise there is no chance of being corrected, if I am wrong.
That's a great attitude! I'd only wish that more people would apply it from both sides of the science/religion divide.
I'm pointing out a logic flaw in your stated assumptions and deductions. I hope you do your homework, young padawan, and reevaluate your beliefs and find which one of them was wrong. Because some arguments that you're using as evident are not logically valid; there is some hidden assumption in them that you should reject, in order to rebuild your otherwise flawless logical castle.
If you are using different axioms to come to different conclusions, evidently one person (or potentially both) must be incorrect in making those assumptions.
There's nothing evident in that. You're still assuming that only one set of beliefs can possibly be correct, which is a wrong assumption. If you learn about formal logic you'll find that your assumption is false - there can be many different interpretations that prove one theory true, and there can be different theories that share most propositions but are otherwise incompatible by just one single axiom.
There is one point when trying to convince others through logic reaches a dead end by the very nature of logic; this fact is what you still haven understood and I'm trying to explain. This point is reached when:
1- you begin with a set of axioms, 2- the other one begins with a different set of axioms, 3- your theory is consistent with your own set but not the other people's 4- and viceversa.
This situation is a dead-end because you can't use logic from your own system to force the other people to change their axioms - adding propositions from your system to the other one will force the other system to contradict itself, so your proposition must be logically rejected.
You're finding yourself at the other end: propositions from religious systems do contradict the belief system derived by your axioms. This doesn't mean that the other system is not logically valid, only that your own axioms (that the other system doesn't include) are not compatible with that system.
When you say things like 'it may not be convincing to others' - you are admitting that your logic is flawed.
Now that you ask for it, this is the failure in your argument. He may have a perfectly sound argument but start from different premises.
But he recognizes that other people can have different axioms and thus logic will lead them to different conclusions. This is what you have to accept to correct your own reasoning.
there are only three reasons for a difference of opinion
Nice fallacy of false dilemma there;-) Your first assumption (that someone's question can be wrong) is a value judgment, not a logical stance. Value judgements always depend on an ultimate belief, that is taken as an axiom of the logical reasoning that follows it.
I would argue that your personal evidence was colored by what you learn in your infancy;-) I have had one kind-of mystical experience myself and it wasn't a fall-off-the-horse conversion because of how I rationalized it.
It's great to debate ideas on their merits alone. If you find another atheist playing the "rational" card on you you have my permission to cite this post by an atheist. I'll ask you in return to not assume that atheists have never had any religious experience and they still need to "see the light". Some of us have had it and are still unconvinced.
I believe it because it works - when I observe something, test it, and apply logic, it generally repeats that outcome in future (and if it doesn't, there is always a reason)
Welcome to how a rational religious person thinks. They apply the very same process and arrive to different conclusions that are perfectly coherent.
They find logical reasons for the things they believe, and they discard ideas that seem illogical to them - like, for example, that everything can be explained by logic and reductionism. They think that some phenomena are big m Misteries, and for things like feelings and social relations their logic is more sound than that of current social sciences. Heck, even the 'I think therefore I am' reasoning you cited was used by Descartes to prove the existence of God!
If you want to defend atheism, don't fall into the trap of thinking that it's the only self-consistent logical position, nor that rational thinking does inevitably lead to it, because that's not true. Learn and accept the limits of your tools, and learn to respect other people who use the same tools in a different way.
You mean, the impure form that includes social policies?
Socialism and Communism only work well in small tight-knit groups, and a lot of very dark history shows clearly that they do not scale well.
European social democracies beg to differ. Social programs in Europe have work fairly well to their intended purpose in the last 160 years; much better than the previous system of guilds and feuds, but also better than the Laissez-faire that substituted them. Of course we know that some capitalist principles must be obeyed to generate wealth, the same way we know that some welfare systems must be in place to get that wealth away from the few hands where it naturally tends to concentrate.
Government social policies are not "parts of the economy" by definition.
Only by that weird definition of yours that ignores the major budget by the major economic agents which are governments, even "capitalistic" ones. My definition of economy includes the whole study of the production&distribution chain where humans are involved, and government is definitely run by humans. If you begin with distorted, biased definitions it's no wonder that you get distorted conclusions.
Have you applied your own requirements to the belief that "the universe works by following a set coherent rules that can be understood by observation and logic"?
Not that I think the belief is wrong, just that it's a belief that can't be proven by logic alone; you would know if you had held it to your own standards. You should give more leeway to rational thinkers that happen to be religious.
Disclaimer - I'm an atheist, who happens to believe that emotion is a deeper motivator of human thought than reason, and that both religious and free-thinking ideals are acquired by emotional attachment to family traditions.
systems that require people to act against their natural tendencies
How come that "work and/or come up with an idea, skill, or invention that's useful to someone else" and "incentive and thinking out of the box" are not acting against people natural tendencies?
Capitalism has allowed more people to live in more relative freedom and at a higher standard of living than any other system ever invented.
You mean like child labour and suburbs? The driving force that alleviated those (in some places, for some groups) was not capitalism alone but social welfare.
Face it, capitalism is not and never was a system that has been put into practice in a pure form, just like socialism nor communism have never been implemented in a way true to their ideals. Every ideology when is put into action gets shaped by a real-world mixture of influences.
Rejecting the parts of the economy that work to improve the well-being of a group (like you do when rejecting social policies) will only make that group worse off. The trick is in balancing the particular methods that work best in each particular situation regardless of what ideology originated them, not rejecting a whole class of economic methods only because you disagree with that ideology's founding fathers.
What is relevant is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are quite happy to obtains something without paying for it.
And as long as they can do it and get away with it, isn't the standard morals of the free market that this is an ethical way to behave? As long as they are not damaging the property of others, it's up to the providers to find a way to make money of their product, not to the "clients" to pay more than they need to get what they want.
Not that I particularly share this viewpoint, but it seems to be a solid one, strongly agreed to by some people.
Hear, hear! It would be great having an unified generic API that can handle all kinds of data, like the UNIX filesystem did; but the file abstraction is no longer valid as that universal API.
I have my hopes on RDF, the simplest possible representation for semantic information. It is fully open source and has lots of support, libraries and research backing it.
Be very, very careful never to trust times measured from inside the same brain that generated them. You're likely falling into the fallacy of the self-perception assesment: first, the brain is perceiving brain-intensive tasks as having different lenght than boring tasks even if they last the same. Second, you're not taking into account the time your brain needs to process the interface in order to decide which action you're going to take.
You need a model like GOMS that takes into account the brain ramp-up time if you want to measure the real performance of the interface for the task. Using only a watch after you've already decided how you will perform the task, is discarding the real advantages of an overall clean design over a crammed one, i.e. it's cheating.
I do not think there were any unfindable functionalities in Office.
Microsoft reasearch on hundreds of thousands of users disagreed with that.
If the goal of the Ribbon was to expose a bigger amount of available commands, then toolbars was a better solution, because toolbars allow for bigger visibility of commands than the Ribbon.
Are you trolling me? Toolbars have less space available than the Ribbon (which has several tabs to place commands), so they can't have a bigger amount of available commands. Sure they're not available at the same time, but that's not the huge advantage that you seem to think it is - having too many options, smaller targets and a layout without big landmarks is a sure way to make the brain slower.
I don't see how the Ribbon helps, since functions are hidden behind tabs. If they wanted the users to find commands, then they should have invested in organizing toolbars in a better way.
There are much less tabs than menu options, and commands in the tabs can be visually organized with hierarchical sizes and layout. A logical spatial organization has been empirically proven to enhance both scanning and memorizing.
The whole point is that they did what you suggest. The Ribbon is the best way they found, based on their research on a huge number of users. You're think that you're able to create a design to beat that?
I don't find "being hidden behind tabs" worse than "being hidden behind folding menus". Quite the opposite in fact; the fixed nature of each tab makes it easier for me to remember the relative positions of all commands in two dimensions, rather than the one-dimensional layout.
Notice that the main goal of the Ribbon is not one of maximum efficiency with the mouse, though it's debatable that the smaller targets in the traditional toolbar were more efficient - they require just one click but by Fitt's Law they're harder to target. The number of clicks is not the only measure to efficiency.
Anyway, the reason why the Ribbon was created was to expose a bigger amount of the available commands. With that goal in mind, the Ribbon is very good from a UI perspective. So, I suppose its quality depends on the goals you try to attain from it - if you're a multi-million megacorp trying to show the many features your product has that were unfindable in the previous layout, the Ribbon is an unmitigated success.
But they have a consistent default text-based tab bar that starts with Home, Insert, Page Layout... and you can press "Alt" and expose it when it's folded.
So what's the complaint, that they changed the default categories? Oh poor boy! Well that's was the whole point: people - even heavy users - couldn't find the features they wanted, so the the old categories you cherish so much simply didn't work. They've changed them to some new task-based ones that actually make sense as the logical position for many (not all) of the commands placed inside them.
With toolbars, everything was hidden because Office 2003 did have that "intelligent menus" that kept removing all commands but the least used. In many occasions the Ribbon reduces required clicks since contextual tabs (for tables and images) are shown by default while the corresponding object is selected.
If you do have a frequently used command you can add it to the quick toolbar which works exactly like the old toolbars and is not hidden, ever. For text formatting, you have a contextual menu that appears on selection with the font editing commands, so 'bold' is always accessible too. Or, you can use the mouse wheel to change the tabs, so the home tab is always a quick swipe away.
The Ribbon is surprisingly well designed for its intended goal, which is exposing a lot of functions without cluttering the interface - much better than the Office 2003 toolbars anyway.
When I switched to 2007 I had problems finding some functions I knew how to perform in the old interface, but that lasted about two or three weeks. As a heavy Office user in my work I already have memorized the commands I need. Having them organized in tabs didn't hinder learning - I didn't need to have them always on screen, just always in the same relative position inside the tab in order to build muscle memory.
Re:User interface as a message from the designer
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 1
s/design deputy/designer's deputy/
User interface as a message from the designer
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The best advice I've found for thinking about user interfaces is by CS. De Souza, the author of the Semiotics of Human-Computer Interaction. She calls the interface a 'design deputy', meaning that the interface is to be seen as a message from the designer saying "this is what I know of you and what I think will serve you best".
The most the designer knows about the users, the better tailored the interface will be. A designer may indeed be condescending when giving that message if she doesn't really know enough about the targeted user.
Yes sometimes users don't know what information they need.
A bad design will force the user create his/her own creative workarounds
Which then become part of the design themselves. A developer wanting to start from a clean slate and throw away the existing "bad design" (that gets the work done) is doomed to repeat many the mistakes of the original design (and creating new ones), and then having to create workarounds for the new system.
a design by the user may be just as bad because they are set in their ways and have a very narrow view of the problem they are trying to solve
In my experience with professional users, they are extremely well versed on the problem they are trying to solve. They hire a developer not because they don't know the problem but because they don't know the possibilities that technology offer.
It's typically the developer who is bad at understanding the problem at hand; mainly because it's not taught as part of the profession. This leads to designs that offer a wide range of possibilities for the wrong problem to solve. A good designer on the other hand will understand the problem before proposing a solution, and that includes learning how the problem relates to the people who do the work.
"The Homer" problem you linked to is caused by using the wrong tools to learn about the user ("listen" tools instead of the proper "watch" tools), not by relying on the user. When you desing a product without watching the user, you come up with this instead.
Nope, usability professionals do it better. Heck, even extreme programmers do it better because at least they have user stories based on user goals, not "features".
Look, users are REALLY good at wanting stuff. Lots of stuff.
That's why in good design you don't listen to users, but watch them instead doing their stuff. A programmer who doesn't watch users using the product will make elementary usability mistakes and won't notice the need to fix them. It doesn't take a big budget, really; google "guerrilla usability" for people who are doing it in the cheap.
you start to hound them to actually tell you exactly what they want
Then you're doing it wrong.
it's YOUR job to figure it out.
Yup, they're right; they're paying you precisely for that. It doesn't mean that you have to guess what they need - you should deduce it as a fact from how they behave in their work.
If you watch them do their thing, they will *love* to explain you why they use the system as they do, and will give actual insight in how it can be improved, instead of a dry "wish list" that doesn't give a clue on why each function point is needed.
The next big advancement in software development is going to be the mind-reader.
It has already been invented, maybe you missed the memo. Read anything about "user experience" or "user-centered design" to see how it's done - sure it didn't exist the last century, but we have improved. (Actually it did exist, it just wasn't used in software, only for airplane cockpits and so).
Seriously, I know what you mean, but your original post puts WAY too much of the blame on the programmers. Guess what I am:)
Almost missed that one sentence! It looked like the sig:-)
I should have clarified at first that I didn't write against all programmers, only those getting specifications. That's not work for a programmer, at least not without getting out of the programmer mindset. Taking specifications need a different thinking cap, but sadly this is not explained in the programming curricula.
Are you saying that users don't know the information they need for their work?
I'm not advocating using the exact design the user arrived to with an spreadsheet. I'm advocating using the same input data and not leaving out any important work flow, even if it's simplified.
Also, if people didn't want to program, Excel wouldn't be so damned popular. Excel and other spreadsheet systems are used 90% of the time as an IDE with a really good integration of data and logic.
And then, spreadsheets are the best available tool for the user to tell the programmer what the finished application should do.
Professional programmers have a record of being utterly bad at getting proper specifications that turn user desires into working code. Every tool that helps get the user involved in the early prototypes helps, and spreadsheets are real good for prototyping.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm trying to argue that you are using wrong logic by name-calling religious axioms. You're assuming that every religious axiom is necessarily illogical, which is the Begging the question fallacy.
As a warm-up exercise you may want to try a much simpler problem: find at which point you do disagree with Descartes in his perfectly logical proof that God exists, preferably by reading his own Meditations (3 and 5 are the ones about God).
Now don't be too rude to the old man, we have about 300 more years of philosophy in hindsight. ;-) This particular analysis was specially helpful to me when learning about rationality.
Your point is logically flawed, since there exist logical ways to have beliefs different than atheism. See my other post here.
This is a non-sequitur. Not logically sound. That argument can be proven false by finding a logical belief system that supports the existence of God.
One particular way to do that is to assume as evidence of God facts that you wouldn't accept as evidence of God because of your own chosen axioms. But if you start from different axioms the same evidence would make a logically valid belief system.
That's a great attitude! I'd only wish that more people would apply it from both sides of the science/religion divide.
I'm pointing out a logic flaw in your stated assumptions and deductions. I hope you do your homework, young padawan, and reevaluate your beliefs and find which one of them was wrong. Because some arguments that you're using as evident are not logically valid; there is some hidden assumption in them that you should reject, in order to rebuild your otherwise flawless logical castle.
There's nothing evident in that. You're still assuming that only one set of beliefs can possibly be correct, which is a wrong assumption. If you learn about formal logic you'll find that your assumption is false - there can be many different interpretations that prove one theory true, and there can be different theories that share most propositions but are otherwise incompatible by just one single axiom.
There is one point when trying to convince others through logic reaches a dead end by the very nature of logic; this fact is what you still haven understood and I'm trying to explain. This point is reached when:
1- you begin with a set of axioms,
2- the other one begins with a different set of axioms,
3- your theory is consistent with your own set but not the other people's
4- and viceversa.
This situation is a dead-end because you can't use logic from your own system to force the other people to change their axioms - adding propositions from your system to the other one will force the other system to contradict itself, so your proposition must be logically rejected.
You're finding yourself at the other end: propositions from religious systems do contradict the belief system derived by your axioms. This doesn't mean that the other system is not logically valid, only that your own axioms (that the other system doesn't include) are not compatible with that system.
Now that you ask for it, this is the failure in your argument. He may have a perfectly sound argument but start from different premises.
But he recognizes that other people can have different axioms and thus logic will lead them to different conclusions. This is what you have to accept to correct your own reasoning.
Nice fallacy of false dilemma there ;-) Your first assumption (that someone's question can be wrong) is a value judgment, not a logical stance. Value judgements always depend on an ultimate belief, that is taken as an axiom of the logical reasoning that follows it.
I would argue that your personal evidence was colored by what you learn in your infancy ;-) I have had one kind-of mystical experience myself and it wasn't a fall-off-the-horse conversion because of how I rationalized it.
It's great to debate ideas on their merits alone. If you find another atheist playing the "rational" card on you you have my permission to cite this post by an atheist. I'll ask you in return to not assume that atheists have never had any religious experience and they still need to "see the light". Some of us have had it and are still unconvinced.
Petroleum is scarce, but it doesn't take a lot of manwork to extract, store and refine. The GP's point is still valid.
Welcome to how a rational religious person thinks. They apply the very same process and arrive to different conclusions that are perfectly coherent.
They find logical reasons for the things they believe, and they discard ideas that seem illogical to them - like, for example, that everything can be explained by logic and reductionism. They think that some phenomena are big m Misteries, and for things like feelings and social relations their logic is more sound than that of current social sciences. Heck, even the 'I think therefore I am' reasoning you cited was used by Descartes to prove the existence of God!
If you want to defend atheism, don't fall into the trap of thinking that it's the only self-consistent logical position, nor that rational thinking does inevitably lead to it, because that's not true. Learn and accept the limits of your tools, and learn to respect other people who use the same tools in a different way.
You mean, the impure form that includes social policies?
European social democracies beg to differ. Social programs in Europe have work fairly well to their intended purpose in the last 160 years; much better than the previous system of guilds and feuds, but also better than the Laissez-faire that substituted them. Of course we know that some capitalist principles must be obeyed to generate wealth, the same way we know that some welfare systems must be in place to get that wealth away from the few hands where it naturally tends to concentrate.
Only by that weird definition of yours that ignores the major budget by the major economic agents which are governments, even "capitalistic" ones. My definition of economy includes the whole study of the production&distribution chain where humans are involved, and government is definitely run by humans. If you begin with distorted, biased definitions it's no wonder that you get distorted conclusions.
Have you applied your own requirements to the belief that "the universe works by following a set coherent rules that can be understood by observation and logic"?
Not that I think the belief is wrong, just that it's a belief that can't be proven by logic alone; you would know if you had held it to your own standards. You should give more leeway to rational thinkers that happen to be religious.
Disclaimer - I'm an atheist, who happens to believe that emotion is a deeper motivator of human thought than reason, and that both religious and free-thinking ideals are acquired by emotional attachment to family traditions.
Just about the same than "Regulation is harmful".
How come that "work and/or come up with an idea, skill, or invention that's useful to someone else" and "incentive and thinking out of the box" are not acting against people natural tendencies?
You mean like child labour and suburbs? The driving force that alleviated those (in some places, for some groups) was not capitalism alone but social welfare.
Face it, capitalism is not and never was a system that has been put into practice in a pure form, just like socialism nor communism have never been implemented in a way true to their ideals. Every ideology when is put into action gets shaped by a real-world mixture of influences.
Rejecting the parts of the economy that work to improve the well-being of a group (like you do when rejecting social policies) will only make that group worse off. The trick is in balancing the particular methods that work best in each particular situation regardless of what ideology originated them, not rejecting a whole class of economic methods only because you disagree with that ideology's founding fathers.
And as long as they can do it and get away with it, isn't the standard morals of the free market that this is an ethical way to behave? As long as they are not damaging the property of others, it's up to the providers to find a way to make money of their product, not to the "clients" to pay more than they need to get what they want.
Not that I particularly share this viewpoint, but it seems to be a solid one, strongly agreed to by some people.
Hear, hear! It would be great having an unified generic API that can handle all kinds of data, like the UNIX filesystem did; but the file abstraction is no longer valid as that universal API.
I have my hopes on RDF, the simplest possible representation for semantic information. It is fully open source and has lots of support, libraries and research backing it.
Be very, very careful never to trust times measured from inside the same brain that generated them. You're likely falling into the fallacy of the self-perception assesment: first, the brain is perceiving brain-intensive tasks as having different lenght than boring tasks even if they last the same. Second, you're not taking into account the time your brain needs to process the interface in order to decide which action you're going to take.
You need a model like GOMS that takes into account the brain ramp-up time if you want to measure the real performance of the interface for the task. Using only a watch after you've already decided how you will perform the task, is discarding the real advantages of an overall clean design over a crammed one, i.e. it's cheating.
Microsoft reasearch on hundreds of thousands of users disagreed with that.
Are you trolling me? Toolbars have less space available than the Ribbon (which has several tabs to place commands), so they can't have a bigger amount of available commands. Sure they're not available at the same time, but that's not the huge advantage that you seem to think it is - having too many options, smaller targets and a layout without big landmarks is a sure way to make the brain slower.
There are much less tabs than menu options, and commands in the tabs can be visually organized with hierarchical sizes and layout. A logical spatial organization has been empirically proven to enhance both scanning and memorizing.
The whole point is that they did what you suggest. The Ribbon is the best way they found, based on their research on a huge number of users. You're think that you're able to create a design to beat that?
I don't find "being hidden behind tabs" worse than "being hidden behind folding menus". Quite the opposite in fact; the fixed nature of each tab makes it easier for me to remember the relative positions of all commands in two dimensions, rather than the one-dimensional layout.
Notice that the main goal of the Ribbon is not one of maximum efficiency with the mouse, though it's debatable that the smaller targets in the traditional toolbar were more efficient - they require just one click but by Fitt's Law they're harder to target. The number of clicks is not the only measure to efficiency.
Anyway, the reason why the Ribbon was created was to expose a bigger amount of the available commands. With that goal in mind, the Ribbon is very good from a UI perspective. So, I suppose its quality depends on the goals you try to attain from it - if you're a multi-million megacorp trying to show the many features your product has that were unfindable in the previous layout, the Ribbon is an unmitigated success.
But they have a consistent default text-based tab bar that starts with Home, Insert, Page Layout... and you can press "Alt" and expose it when it's folded.
So what's the complaint, that they changed the default categories? Oh poor boy! Well that's was the whole point: people - even heavy users - couldn't find the features they wanted, so the the old categories you cherish so much simply didn't work. They've changed them to some new task-based ones that actually make sense as the logical position for many (not all) of the commands placed inside them.
With toolbars, everything was hidden because Office 2003 did have that "intelligent menus" that kept removing all commands but the least used. In many occasions the Ribbon reduces required clicks since contextual tabs (for tables and images) are shown by default while the corresponding object is selected.
If you do have a frequently used command you can add it to the quick toolbar which works exactly like the old toolbars and is not hidden, ever. For text formatting, you have a contextual menu that appears on selection with the font editing commands, so 'bold' is always accessible too. Or, you can use the mouse wheel to change the tabs, so the home tab is always a quick swipe away.
The Ribbon is surprisingly well designed for its intended goal, which is exposing a lot of functions without cluttering the interface - much better than the Office 2003 toolbars anyway.
When I switched to 2007 I had problems finding some functions I knew how to perform in the old interface, but that lasted about two or three weeks. As a heavy Office user in my work I already have memorized the commands I need. Having them organized in tabs didn't hinder learning - I didn't need to have them always on screen, just always in the same relative position inside the tab in order to build muscle memory.
s/design deputy/designer's deputy/
The best advice I've found for thinking about user interfaces is by CS. De Souza, the author of the
Semiotics of Human-Computer Interaction. She calls the interface a 'design deputy', meaning that the interface is to be seen as a message from the designer saying "this is what I know of you and what I think will serve you best".
The most the designer knows about the users, the better tailored the interface will be. A designer may indeed be condescending when giving that message if she doesn't really know enough about the targeted user.
Which then become part of the design themselves. A developer wanting to start from a clean slate and throw away the existing "bad design" (that gets the work done) is doomed to repeat many the mistakes of the original design (and creating new ones), and then having to create workarounds for the new system.
In my experience with professional users, they are extremely well versed on the problem they are trying to solve. They hire a developer not because they don't know the problem but because they don't know the possibilities that technology offer.
It's typically the developer who is bad at understanding the problem at hand; mainly because it's not taught as part of the profession. This leads to designs that offer a wide range of possibilities for the wrong problem to solve. A good designer on the other hand will understand the problem before proposing a solution, and that includes learning how the problem relates to the people who do the work.
"The Homer" problem you linked to is caused by using the wrong tools to learn about the user ("listen" tools instead of the proper "watch" tools), not by relying on the user. When you desing a product without watching the user, you come up with this instead.
Nope, usability professionals do it better. Heck, even extreme programmers do it better because at least they have user stories based on user goals, not "features".
That's why in good design you don't listen to users, but watch them instead doing their stuff. A programmer who doesn't watch users using the product will make elementary usability mistakes and won't notice the need to fix them. It doesn't take a big budget, really; google "guerrilla usability" for people who are doing it in the cheap.
Then you're doing it wrong.
Yup, they're right; they're paying you precisely for that. It doesn't mean that you have to guess what they need - you should deduce it as a fact from how they behave in their work.
If you watch them do their thing, they will *love* to explain you why they use the system as they do, and will give actual insight in how it can be improved, instead of a dry "wish list" that doesn't give a clue on why each function point is needed.
It has already been invented, maybe you missed the memo. Read anything about "user experience" or "user-centered design" to see how it's done - sure it didn't exist the last century, but we have improved. (Actually it did exist, it just wasn't used in software, only for airplane cockpits and so).
Almost missed that one sentence! It looked like the sig :-)
I should have clarified at first that I didn't write against all programmers, only those getting specifications. That's not work for a programmer, at least not without getting out of the programmer mindset. Taking specifications need a different thinking cap, but sadly this is not explained in the programming curricula.
Are you saying that users don't know the information they need for their work?
I'm not advocating using the exact design the user arrived to with an spreadsheet. I'm advocating using the same input data and not leaving out any important work flow, even if it's simplified.
Finally, someone who gets it.
And then, spreadsheets are the best available tool for the user to tell the programmer what the finished application should do.
Professional programmers have a record of being utterly bad at getting proper specifications that turn user desires into working code. Every tool that helps get the user involved in the early prototypes helps, and spreadsheets are real good for prototyping.