I read the title of one of Mike Arrington's recent posts and thought he was being sarcastic. Glory be, he's serious!
Mike relates user complaints about Facebook's interface changes to design by committee. That's wrong. Design by committee is before the fact, user feedback is after. I don't think any user is saying they can do a better job at designing the Facebook interface; they're just saying what they hate about what Facebook themselves have done.
So the broad ideas, vision, back-end architecture and all that is very much Facebook's job. This is NOT what users should be doing, ie users aren't involved in core design. Users don't design either Porsches or iPhones; expert designers do. What users can in turn do (generally speaking) is provide the market reaction. Give feedback on specific hitches and glitches that affect them. What Robert Scoble calls taking "splinters out of the experience".
Someone else comments on the same page:
Ignoring your users much of the time is the path to oblivion for a company. The examples cited about Porsche and the iPhone are examples of survivor bias. There’s probably 100 or 1000 examples for each of those where the idea and/or the company bit the dust.
How true. Case studies are one thing but can we look at the universe please?
