Customer + designer = better design
As a designer, when building software experiences, it is extremely important to co-own this role with the target customers/users who use the product.
The tricky part about this relationship is, the designer must always have the upper hand of the ownership but the customer must believe that they have the upper hand.
Please don’t take this the wrong way! Let me try to make this clearer. A customer should have the liberty and freedom to express any ideas and they should be heard like they are the CEO’s. The ideas might be regarding feedback on current features, potentially new features, or visionary ideas etc..
If one customer is having a problem, chances are other customers are having the same problem 1,000,000% of the time. Please don’t get caught up on outliers, of course there may be some …
Think of it this way. Imagine you have been dropped off at a new country that you’ve never visited before and you need to drive and get to a specific destination. Now if there was a local person next to you and directing you, you can get to your destination a lot faster than the alternative.
The visitor is the designer and the local is the customer. For the designer to reach its destination, he/she must listen to the local person, the person who lives there and knows the ins and outs of the city, hence the customer.
The bottom line is when a designer’s decision is aided by his partner, the customer, the outcome is almost always better than the sole decision of the designer. *(There are some rare times the designer needs to drive without a partner)
At the end I would like to mention one thing, as a designer, you have two silver bullet answers that make you look good.
I formulated my design solutions by talking to customers, testing it and validating it with x customers.
As a designer my decisions were also aided by industry standards and guidelines. This helps you to objectively address subjective opinions.
To summarize it all:
Customer + designer = better design
better design = Happy Customer
Happy Customers = Everything