I recently did a talk in a conference in Orlando on this subject. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine that everyone in the IT industry regards 'user requirements' as sacrosanct. In reality end users might not have the faintest idea of new technologies, and therefore tend to frame their requirements around what they know.
To prepare for the talk I googled the phrase in the title, and got thousands of responses - generally software companies claiming their software 'works the way you do'. This got me thinking about the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they want they would have asked for a faster horse". In researching this I found a modern equivalent - Steve Jobs quoted in Fortune as saying "We do no market research". And he sold 6.9M iPhones in Q3.
This got me thinking further, and I googled the phrase "Software that works the way it works". And got one response. One. And that was meant in a derogatory fashion.
What's the disconnect here - how come Apple can brag that their hardware / software product works in the new and wonderful ways it works, but corporate IT departments and suppliers are beholden to producing stuff that replicates current (often bad) practices?
