I agree big time on your points. They are both things that are very important. I think it usually depends on the company though. The user experience tends to be something “Flash” guys care about more than traditional developers. Times are changing and its becoming more and more a business requirement, but its just something I noticed.

I would like to add (or to be precise “insert” 2 more items at the top of your list):

1. User experience first. We found it to be very useful to start designing an application from the user level. Before your diagrams are drawn or the interfaces are defined, ask yourself the following questions: What is the most convenient way for a user to use feature A. How many steps would a user need to make to get task B done? How can you simplify it even further? I believe product architecture is an after step from the “user-experiece design”.

2. Ease-of-use. I believe it is absolutely imperative to set the ease-of-use as an overall goal for your product. If you manage to achieve the uttermost simplest way to get things done in your product, it will go ways to make it successful. Most of the times it would mean introducing and hiding that extra complexity from a user. For instance, if your competition requires 5 steps to get a task done, and you manage to collapse it to 1, you are ahead of your competition and users will love the new simple way to do things.

cheers,
Joe

From the start, our product has been designed with a very broad customisation layer, so that we can deal with client needs that would generally be handled by a traditional software consulting model.

It’s basically a hybrid of the two approaches, and has a whole other set of issues especially with documentation and how far we allow customisation to go, but we seem to be able to manage it.