On page 5 of Information Dashboard Design Stephen Few writes:

This failure by software vendors to focus on what we actually need is hardly unique to dashboards. Most software suffers from the same shortcoming-despite all the hype about user friendliness, it is difficult to use.

This sad state is so common, and has been for so long, we've grown accustomed to the pain. On those occasions when this ugly truth breeches the surface of our consciousness, we usually blame the problem on ourselves rather than the software, framing it in terms of "computer Illiteracy". If we could only adapt more to the computer and how it works, there wouldn't be a problem-or so we reason.

In his insightful book entitled The Inmates are Running the Asylum, master designer Alan Cooper Writes:

The sad thing about dancing bearware (Coopers term for poorly designed software that is difficult to use) is that most people are quite satisfied with the lumbering beast. Only when they see some real dancing do they begin to suspect that there is a world beyond ursine shuffling. So few software-based products have exhibited any real dancing ability that most people are honestly unaware that things could be better - a lot better.

Cooper argues that this failure is rooted in an approach to software development that simply doesn't work. In a genuine attempt to please their customers, software engineers focus on checking all items, one by one, off of lists of requested features. This approach makes sense to technology oriented software engineers, but it results in lumbering beasts.

Customers are expert in knowing what they want to accomplish, but not in knowing how software ought to be designed to support their needs.

Allowing customers to design software through feature requests is the worst form of disaster by committee.