This is a great article, and it re-iterates something I've seen time and time again in website usability tests: People aren't stupid, they're just bad at expressing their desires. Generally a feature request has a good basis, but the proposed feature may not be the best solution.

Exactly. Listen to user's problems, not their solutions.

It's not just that users aren't good at expressing their desires. They're not good at knowing their desires.

Look at what users do, not what they say. Good metrics and a little cleverness is usually better than any sort of feature request form.

edit: Hackers are not exceptions to this rule.

"Best" is contextual. "Undo" is conceptually simple to a user. It is often a nightmare to put into and existing code base.

I've seen this principle presented before (thanks paul), but I appreciate how a concrete example like the one in this article really makes it clear.

I think one key takeaway of this article is also that a comments form is not the same as doing user testing.

...or as an old-school Mac developer once put it to me: Get in your time machine and go back to 1982. Now take a survey: How many people ask for bit-mapped graphics and a mouse?

This is a great observation. Part of the reason for this behavior is almost all the people I've met who tout usability tests come from the old school market research/focus group approaches. Put people in a room and listen to what they talk. I've experienced this first hand. I've even put up mock print screens of the click flow and inevitably there is a disjoint. That does not work - the only reliable way is to put the actual working app out there and observe them use it. OBSERVE the users (with the UI guy in room) and correlate/validate what you see with objective page abandonment/scenario data on Google Analytics. Its a little bit of work but I think it totally completes the picture. Excellent observations.

For some reason this article reminded me of this old TV segment that was hosted by the Genie from Aladdin. The title was "Great minds think for themselves." The title always stuck with me (along with apples "think differently" slogan) in that no one thinks the same. A group of people may approach a problem the same way, but there will never be one true way of doing something. This is why I think it's important to get external feedback from people totally unrelated to you. Sure it can be painful, but feedback almost always helps, I mean heck it's the entire philosophy behind web2.0.

Anyway great article and great responses here.

Of course Jakob Nielson said this first quite some time ago.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010805.html