Question Everything
quotesRobert Hoekman Jr gained notoriety recently for his vituperative post about Whitney Hess. Whatever you think about that post, he followed it up with an excellent post encouraging the UX design community to “>Question Everything. Here are some choice cuts:
Apple didn’t make the page simple. They made it clear. Despite all the hype that we must make things dead simple, and dumb them down, simplicity is not the goal, clarity is.
[T]he best teams — the teams earning the most provable success most consistently — were teams that had no process. They had a bunch of tools, tricks, and techniques. They had generalists, and maybe a specialist or two. And on any given project, they hand-picked the tools they would use to solve the problem and they improvised.
For the good of your profession, your work, your clients, and most of all, your users:
1. Ask why. Ask for an explanation. A justification. Ask this over and over and over until there are no answers left to uncover.
2. Ask for evidence.
3. Ask if there’s a better way.