“Of course, people don't want to hear me say that they need to test their [User interface]UI. And they definitely don't want to hear that they have to actually move their precious butts to a customer location to watch real people do the work the application is supposed to support.”
“The general idea seems to be that real programmers can't be let out of their cages. My view is just the opposite: no one should be allowed to work on an application unless they've spent a day observing a few end users.”
Source: Top 10 application-design mistakes | Nielsen Norman Group, Jakob Nielsen, 2008
I agree with Jakob’s thoughts on this from 2008. Developers need to observe end users. In fact you might as well set up regular user observation and testing and get your executives in on it too after all they are usually bank rolling development. Steve Krug has a great guide to this called ‘Rocket surgery made easy: The do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems’.