Perspective (from Latin perspicere, to see through)
-Wikipedia

Perspective is one of those talents that some programmers have innately. Experience may hone this ability. Perspective is a huge part of designing software. It is being able to see what the users want, not, what they say they want. There are some people who just get it right.

If the designers of a system do not have the proper perspective you will find many symptoms. Example of this is when working on an application, and you find levels, and levels of detail when only very little of the system is actually used. Too much detail just reeks of over engineering, and you can just hear the developers wheels turning as they try to flush out every edge case. This is a very dangerous pit, and as developers we must be vary wary of this.

Many other symptoms of lack of perspective exist. Another common symptom is a very slow system that appear very simple on the outside. Usually this means that either too much planning went into the back end, or very little attention was paid to performance. On the other hand a system with inconsistent screens, poor usability you, but it performs well, usually means that designing the logic was the important part of the project, and the UI was an after thought.

All of these are symptoms are caused by lack of perspective, the proverbial forest for the trees. If you do not see applications as a whole, that are used by users, you will get lost and end up fighting the wrong battles. You end with over engineered software, or over engineered sections of software, you design the system how you would like it rather than what is needed. This is just one of the reasons software development and I.T. can get a bad name.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel every one has a little bit of perspective, and intuition, it is just harder to tap into. If you find yourself in the middle of development, and things are going badly. Take a step back, ask yourself some questions. The questions that works for me is the person getting the software going to love it? If they are going to complain about speed, ease of use, complexity, the you’ve done something wrong. Users want what you want, they want to be able to do their job and not worry about their tools.

My final caveat on this is: All software is used by users, even if indirectly.

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