How many times have you excitedly tried to show your parents some project you're working on and gotten a confused or indifferent response? My reaction has often been to dismiss this disconnect as the result of a generation-gap, but a recent experience has led me to rethink that.
At work, we're getting very close to start unleashing our product on the world and so I was doing a little demo for my mom. At first this started to feel like other times when I've showed her things I've worked and she'll focus on some seemingly insignificant detail or re-imagines the application in terms that seem very specific to her world. I felt my usual generation-gap defenses warming up and I started to wrap up the demo. No point in going any further, right?
But after a few more moments I was able to demonstrate enough compelling features that she was engaged. More importantly I became engaged in her reaction to the system. The barrier between us where each side couldn't really grok the other seemed to fall. I was able to have a better understanding of how she might look at it, instead of how I've been looking at for the past year and a half.
So perhaps it's trite and obvious to state that one can benefit from giving yourself the time and patience to understand your users. But I think it's especially true when dealing with other generations. If you can come up with something that crosses those barriers like my impromptu demo did, by George you're probably onto something.