This is a fundamental practice of quality management. In the 'Total Quality Management' approach (inspired by Deming's work) the idea is called Kansei and it essentially means: watching how the user users the product will lead to improvements in the product. We see how this has worked well for Agile and Scrum, methodologies in which customer collaboration and feedback are frequent.

The four main principles of the TQM idea are:

Kaizen: Continuous Process Improvement

Atarimae Hinshitsu: things should work as they are supposed to

Kansei: understanding how the user uses the product will lead to improvements in the product

Miryokuteki Hinshitsu: things should have an aesthetic quality, be pleasant

There are two things programmers should always do, but are way too lazy (myself included). In my case, it helps I know i'll deal myself with the consequences of shoddy programming, but it's still hard to go against your nature.

1. Test anything. My apps tend to be flat and simple (business software with web interface) so automated testing is not a real option. Simply going through the motions before uploading on the servers finds 80% of bugs... but it requires considerable discipline to go through 10 minutes of data entry to check a bug fix which took you 5 minutes to code.

2. Occasionally put yourself in the user's shoes and do whatever he's doing every day. I seldom did this and not come up with an idea or two.