There’s a common refrain in online discussions about software that “most people don’t use or need that, it’s just a niche that doesn’t matter.” As someone who works in user experience every day, I’m constantly surprised by the divergence between how I assume users use my software versus how they actually use it. These surprises inform how I do my work and they’re invaluable in delivering great software for users.

For what it’s worth, I’m also always interested to see how users assume they know how everyone else uses our software. Sometimes they’re close, but often they’d also be surprised how other people do things. A common refrain I have internally is, “we could do this customer request, and it would make a few people happy, but it would anger even more.”

I think we got to see a real life example of this recently with Overcast’s removal of streaming from the latest major update. Marco builds the app and he can see some metrics normal users like us can’t see, and he was pretty confident that removing streaming wouldn’t be a huge deal. Here’s a quote from the ATP podcast episode when he talked about his decision:

I've thrown some timers and made a histogram and see if there are some outliers. Maybe those outliers are the 8% that are currently using streaming, or maybe the people are currently using streaming that are doing it because for some reason I thought it would be better and than ever change the setting. And totally, what I hear the most from people, I guess I don't have data on this, but what I hear the most from people about why they use streaming. Number one is to save space on their phone. So they don't download everything. And that, honestly, that makes sense to me.

To Marco’s credit, he did say that he wasn’t 100% sure about this, and that if it went over poorly he’d try to add streaming back somehow.

As it turned out, removing streaming was a massive problem for users, way more people relied on it than he thought, it set his business “on fire” (his words) and he’s had to fast-track adding the feature back to the app.

I’m writing this post to remind everyone to have a little more humility when suggesting you know how other people use software. You may have good intuition and be right more than the average person, but as we see all the time with software, even the people working on things often miss the mark with what their users actually want. Why are you so special that you definitely know what 80% of users want about something you don’t work on and haven’t done user research on firsthand?

By all means, suggest new things, guess what other people would want from the apps we use every day, but do it will a little more openness to the fact you might be wrong.