This is an excellent tenet in general. A landscape designer at school was re-doing the engineering quad and there was a lot of debate about where to put foot paths, and the designer said, "We will put down grass everywhere, then after a year come back and see where the paths are, then we will add stones for the foot paths." It was pretty effective.

I think if you were a product designer you would do well to have users send you their customization files to extract things that were common to all of them to put into the product.

And of course Windows was pretty famous (infamous?) for taking what ever shareware thing people were giving out to make Windows work better and then incorporating it into the base OS. I read a review of Windows '95 that called it "Windows 3.1 with Norton Desktop pre-installed."