Gould and Lewis [5] raised the issue of user diversity in their analysis and found that designers either over-estimated user diversity or under-estimated user diversity. They also found that designers and engineers often relied on their intuitions and hypotheses about users. Many of the product stakeholders in our study also cited their own intuitions and experiences as being important in pushing for certain designs; however, as explained in the following account, increasingly the stakeholders realized that their own intuitions were less relevant:
…when I started here the demographic and socioeconomic makeup of the company was very similar to the user base…our own feelings were an excellent proxy for users…what we thought was cool, many users would agree was cool…we’re now many moons from that time…when we make a new photo upload button, it needs to be equally intuitive to a 90 year Mongolian grandmother to a 14 year old Brazilian soccer player…