Design for the few, please the many.

Quite often when I'm describing interaction design and advocating a narrow focus for design, I use the analogy of how roll on suitcases were created (which I stole from Alan Cooper) to explain my point of view.

A new article from Christina Wodtke (Author of Blueprints for the web) describes the same thing rather eloquently, by describing how Yahoo Maps helped reporters find interviewees for a news scoop.