> I was sympathetic to these arguments, especially the second. But many customers repeatedly asked for the export feature. This is the gist of what I think is

> I was sympathetic to these arguments, especially the second. But many customers repeatedly asked for the export feature. This is the gist of what I think is good design: don't second-guess your users. When you're doing the wireframe, you don't have all the information, ever. You don't know what your users are going to need, you don't know how they're going to use your application. You may have the best, most comprehensive specs ever written in the history of software development and users will still find new ways to use your application, that you've never thought about and couldn't even possibly imagine. So when an user wants something, "good design" consists of figuring out how to integrate it in your application. Not of patronizing your users and explaining them that they don't really need that, or that a clean, intuitive UI is more important than that thing they asked for. They asked for that thing precisely because that clean, intuitive UI was great but it came short of doing what they needed. And when an application with a worse UI that does what that user needs comes along, they are going to switch to it, no questions asked. Because a bad-looking program that does what you need -- i.e. that helps you do your job and earn your pay -- will always trump one that doesn't do what you need.