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This week in UX-clinic: Drowning in customer love

This week in the ux-clinic discussion forum– Drowning in customer love:

We’re a small UX group (designers & usability engineer) for a large website – we constantly face the problem of decision makers who believe in customer omnipotence – that if the customer say blinking green, we should do blinking green. If they ask for 150 links in the nav bar, we should put 150 links in the nav bar. etc. All sanity goes out the window in our org if an important customer asks for an insane thing.

We’ve tried a few times to explain a better way to use customer input, but there seems to be this impenetrable, literal faith in “the customer is always right” that we can’t get past, and it’s hurting our work. We’ll be paying for some of these bad decisions for months to come.

Two questions:
1. What’s a better philosophy for using customer input/opinion
2. How do you convert people to that philosophy (without brain transplants)

– Drowning in customer love