Users often have no idea what they actually want.
This is really important and often underemphasized. People don’t reflect on why they feel they want X or Y. We don’t know if it’s some objective reason or a product of an arbitrary decision some other software maker taught us. Famous example for this is pinch-to-zoom. The first people who tried it on the iPhone found it seriously unintuitive and even difficult. Apple spent a lot of effort teaching people to pinch-to-zoom. Then you have the case where we don’t even know what we might like if we haven’t experienced it. The do-what-people-want mantra runs into these and other rrlated problems and projects that live by it often aren’t the best things out there. Good projects typically do a mix of both. Human-computer interaction / UX are legitimate research disciplines for a reason and they’ve yielded very useful heuristics to produce better software.
Absolutely true.