Credit: Amy Nguyen

A great slide came across twitter the other day, which rang really true after having a heated conversation with someone at the OpenStack PTG. They were convinced certain API behavior would not be confusing because the users would have carefully read all the API documentation and understood a set of caveats buried in there. They were also astonished by the idea that people (including those in the room) write software against APIs by skimming, smashing bits into a thing, getting one successful response, and shipping it.

The theme of the slide is really Empathy. You have to have empathy for your users. They know much less about your software then you do. And they have a different lived experience so even the way they would approach whatever you put out there might be radically different from what you expected.