Jonathan DiCarlo (from Mozilla Labs) about developers, users, and user interfaces:
5. Are users dumb?
User interface design is not about dumbing things down for the poor stupid user.
We software developers, understanding the software as we do, find it easy to look down upon those who lack our understanding.
This is wrong.
Users aren’t dumb. They just have better things to do with their lives than memorizing the internal data model of our screwy software.
When software is hard to use, don’t make excuses for it. Improve it.
When a user makes a mistake, don’t blame the user. Ask how the software misled them. Then fix it.
The user’s time is more valuable than ours. Respect it.
Good UI design is humble.