How do you make your product better? Simple. Ask the people who use it. Ask your customers.

That's the thesis of an article by Michael Fitzgerald in today's NYT: How to Improve It? Ask Those Who Use It

There's a companion article about Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which relies on humans to provide the bits of artificial intelligence that software is not yet capable of delivering, and another one about how researchers at the University of Michigan have proven that human's can't really multitask efficiently.

Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes," said David E. Meyer, a cognitive scientist and director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan. "Disruptions and interruptions are a bad deal from the standpoint of our ability to process information."

Here's the connections I see

• It makes sense for companies to reach out to their clients, and get product design help from their clients. Â That means talking directly with clients, and crucially, being willing to hear criticism. Â It also means that you need to figure out a way to actually get your client involved. Â In the software business, that means exposing elements of your product as a service and as an API.
• Mechanical Turk has proven that folding people into even the most technical software processes actually works.
• End users clearly want to participate because they are getting overwhelmed with multitasking requirements.

Where end users can string together the APIs from 3 or 4 web services into one unified composite application (or mashup), they have created an improved product.  The customer is doing the innovation.  And, they have also reduced complexity in their life.  Instead of having to multitask as they manually co-ordinate information across silos that might be as disparate as a spreadsheet, LinkedIn, Xing, SalesForce, Gmail and BigContacts, they enjoy the benefits of having one highly customized solution take care of it all for them.