fooj 's Public Library

MYTH: Eliminate
alternatives ASAP. Designers should not waste time exploring alternative
approaches, but should stick with one unless it collapses under its own weight
-- and only then explore a new approach.

REALITY: All too often, design alternatives are quickly rejected out-of-hand,
usually for reasons of technical complexity or coding effort. In addition,
designers sometimes tend to go down the first "design path" they see, taking
each fork in the road as it arises without consulting users. It is important to
dedicate a period of time to quickly generating and exploring a number of
high-level design alternatives. Then, select the one with the most promise for
supporting the critical user tasks (not just the one that's easiest to
implement).

MYTH: Users should design
user interfaces. Designers should avoid making decisions on behalf of the user
-- users know best what they need. The best thing we could do is give them a
blank sheet of paper and get out of their way.

REALITY: Occasionally user interface developers get lucky when choosing users
to take the lead in design. However, most users are good at reacting to product
designs and notoriously bad at identifying the sources of their reactions.
Participatory design is a good thing, but is sometimes treated as a panacea
leading to abdication of responsibility. The responsibility of user interface
designers is to design, and then get user feedback on their design ideas