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User Is A Four Letter Word: "The term 'user' is not just a pronoun, it is a powerful buzzword that pervades the software development literature, to both good and bad effect. On the up side, the development community has been made aware of the dominating role that end user experience plays in determining the success or failure of many projects. On the down side, the message of the importance of user feedback to the development process has been adopted by some with uncritical fervor. In their efforts to be 'user focused', guided by simplistic notions of 'usability', many managers and programmers uncritically accept whatever users tell them as a mandate. 'The customer is always right' makes a nice slogan but a poor substitute for critical thought. If you want to deliver a product that is genuinely useful, it is important to moderate the user feedback you receive with your own knowledge of usability principles, and to seek independent confirmation of the information they relate. For it is a fact seldom acknowledged in the text books that users are frequently uninformed, mistaken or deliberately deceptive. User Fraud There are two types of fraud - the deliberate fraud and the pious fraud. Both make false statements; the former knowing that they are false, the latter believing them to be true. The user community contains both types. Suppose you are writing a system that "