Found a new interesting blog today over on Creating Passionate Users.  The author of this particular post on "We can't leave innovation up to our users" has a pretty good point, the vast majority of people never ask for revolutionary innovation. Very rarely do a majority of users come by and ask for something that is really innovative, like the new Office 2007 Ribbon, the iPod, or Expose.  Listening directly to what your users are asking for often leads to only incremental changes.

Unfortunately I think we're all guilty of listening to these types of incremental requests from time to time.  Some of us perhaps more than others.  It's a difficult game to win however, if you go off and work solely on innovative cool things, you may end up with something that is unusable or unnecessary, and your users won't be happy.  At the same time, you could end up with the next killer feature, and everyone will demand your product.

How do you know what to do?  You make educated guesses, try to figure out what people need to do and how to do it, and most of all, you bet on things.  You will fail from time to time, but it's a better approach than never delivering anything innovative and fun.

As we (slowly) get into the design phase for the next generation of Office, I'm going to keep these principals in mind.