At first blush, this design principle might seem incredibly egocentric. And, indeed, there is a danger of over-generalizing from your own personal tastes and interests. But we have found that we do a much better job as designers of creativity support tools when we ourselves really enjoy using the tools that we are building.

We feel that this approach is, ultimately, more respectful to users of the technology. Why should we impose on users systems that we don’t enjoy using ourselves? For example, we are generally skeptical of educational software that, in an effort to encourage students to reflect on their actions, requires that they annotate each action. We wouldn’t want to do that with the software that we use, so why should we require it of students? Software engineering tools that require commenting, rather than encourage it, are similarly disliked by users.