"I guess ketchup is ketchup."

From The Ketchup Conundrum, by Malcolm Gladwell:

Then, in 1986, he [Moskowitz] got a call from the Campbell's Soup Company. They were in the spaghetti-sauce business, going up against Ragú with their Prego brand. Prego was a little thicker than Ragú, with diced tomatoes as opposed to Ragú's purée, and, Campbell's thought, had better pasta adherence. But, for all that, Prego was in a slump, and Campbell's was desperate for new ideas.

Standard practice in the food industry would have been to convene a focus group and ask spaghetti eaters what they wanted. But Moskowitz does not believe that consumers--even spaghetti lovers--know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. "The mind," as Moskowitz is fond of saying, "knows not what the tongue wants."

When I read this, it immediately reminded me of software development: the mind knows not what the user wants. The article (which I recommend reading in it's entirety) goes on to describe the experiments done by Moskowitz to discover what spaghetti eaters really wanted: a four-city tour with forty-five varieties of spaghetti sauce, and groups of twenty-five people each eating eight to ten small bowls of spaghetti. Wow. It made me wish that software was as easy to make as spaghetti sauce, so that we could test variations on user interfaces and functionality with similar depth and breadth.

I suspect that taste-testers won't have the fun all to themselves for long, though. Software is becoming easier to develop, and putting together a basic user interface (and even some basic functionality) is almost as easy these days as cooking up some spaghetti sauce. So look out world, your next "taste" test may be done in front of a computer, while you compare the user interface of your favorite email client to that of Brand X's email client. Let's just hope that the "Heinz of software", the formula for user interfaces with strong salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami flavors all blended with perfect amplitude, isn't discovered (and patented) by Microsoft first.