It's analogous to the "should you listen to parents or childless people on the topic of parenthood/children issues". Parents are strongly biased, but they also know much more about the issue.
Or: when seeking driving advice, would you reject a priori the opinions of professional drivers, just because they're not representative of the general population? You would be justified in rejecting their views when considering your marketing strategy. Which kind of makes me think that a lot of reasons for pushing the "devs are not representative users" thought aren't about how to best serve users.
It’s nothing like that at all. Those are opinions influenced by technical expertise and experience. User interfaces and design that people like is completely based on personal preferences and tastes. It’s more like the driving instructor telling the pupil that they are factually incorrect for liking Ford cars because of some technical inferiority the instructor believes they have over some other car.
Your technical insight doesn’t make your user experience any more or less valuable or important.
I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important. I'm saying that my technical expertise lets me understand my experience better, reason about it better, and communicate it better. I know concepts and vocabulary that a non-tech-savvy user doesn't, which makes it easier for me to pin-point sources of frustration.
User interfaces are an acquired taste. A shiny-looking app built on newest design trends may look appealing at first. But once you're couple hours into using it, your outlook changes. It suddenly starts to matter whether the application is able to handle reasonable-sized workloads without slowing to a crawl (many web applications can't). It matters whether you can use the keyboard instead of clicking on everything. It matters whether the application is fast and responsive, and doesn't. lag. on. you. every. click.
What long experience with software - both as a creator and as a consumer - gives me is the language and ability to look past the shiny facade, and spot the issues that will matter long-term.
> I never said that technical expertise makes my experience more (or less) important.
But then immediately dive into a long winded explanation of why your own personal opinions are superior. If you have some deeply academic reason for not likening something, but millions of user just absolutely love how shiny it is, then you can’t prove they’re wrong for doing so, nor that your opinion is in any way better or more valuable than theirs.
When I meet the user that prefers shiny over functional after working for a few hours with each, I'll change my mind. I haven't met that user yet.
What I've seen though is that users almost never have any say in the matter. Software is generally forced upon users - mandated by their employers, being the only way to access a particular service or a social network, etc. Users have little say in how the software works.
