What Software Users Want – and What Programmers Give

[via Roland Tanglao] Bram Cohen summarises the gap very well:

The things which will make people love your software, by rapidly plummeting order of importance, are:

1. ease of use
2. stability
3. performance
4. features

The order of priority many people use when writing software, and, unfortunately, what users generally say they want when asked, are:

1. features
2. performance
3. stability
4. ease of use

This is a siginificant discrepancy.