Why you should assume no one cares about your project as much as you do

Here’s our favorite piece of advice from Think Brownstone’s User Experience Design Summit: Assume that no user cares about your project as much as you do. (This reminder has hung in the Technical.ly offices for years.)
That’s what South Philly-based content strategist Sara Wachter-Boettcher does.
“We get so personally invested because we work on [these projects] every day,” she said, “but when we realize that, we can make better decisions.”
That assumption helps you “strip away what’s not necessary and get to the point sooner,” said the A List Apart editor, while on a panel to close the day’s programming.
After fellow panelist and former WHYY news chief Chris Satullo related a story about an article that someone said, decades later, changed her life, Wachter-Boettcher agreed that it is possible that a user does care about the product as much as you do, but you can’t assume that.
“You have to earn that,” she said.
She continued: “Users are going to do what they’re going to do. We don’t get to control that. Wishing that they acted differently isn’t gonna help us.”