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This is a really insightful point, design wouldn't be learnable if it always relied on discovery through testing. Compare to giant companies like Twitter, wher

This is a really insightful point, design wouldn't be learnable if it always relied on discovery through testing. Compare to giant companies like Twitter, where I have heard engineering & product managers say "Every idea has been thought of, it's only a matter of testing them one after another." What an intellectually bankrupt idea. It is the most experienced product designers who can just look at something and tell you if it is good or bad, before trying it, that big corp product undermines the most.

chii 7y ago
> It is the most experienced product designers who can just look at something and tell you if it is good or bad, before trying it, that big corp product undermines the most. that's because for every product designer that can tell good from bad, there are 10's of pretenders who dont know what they're talking about. The stakeholders don't have the time or expertise to vet (otherwise, they'd be product designers themselves!). Thus, they need objective verification. This is what turns into the 'matter of testing the idea'.
mntmoss 7y ago
I call it the method of creating self-feedback. Everyone starts off by using hunches, "taste", and the opinion of the crowd or authorities. But to get beyond that - and getting beyond playtesting, data-collection and other brute force feedback mechanisms entails doing so - one has to systematically devise original feedback signals - pass-fail checklists, writers' rubrics, dependency graphs, workout logs and so on. Once you have the framework in hand and have validated its philosophical premise to some degree, you can feed your work and ideas through it and it automatically corrects you and guides the ideas away from major fallacies. Of course, some amount of experimental data helps, but the huge amounts we have grown accustomed to have a habit of producing a lot of busywork - a product tuned and tweaked and prodded to improve this or that short-term KPI or audience appeal metric - without striking at the critical issues that one can probe with a bit of followthrough on self-feedback.
lonelappde 7y ago
It maybe a worldwide communications ecosystem is a different problems space from a throwaway videogame.

chii 7y ago

> It is the most experienced product designers who can just look at something and tell you if it is good or bad, before trying it, that big corp product undermines the most. that's because for every product designer that can tell good from bad, there are 10's of pretenders who dont know what they're talking about. The stakeholders don't have the time or expertise to vet (otherwise, they'd be product designers themselves!). Thus, they need objective verification. This is what turns into the 'matter of testing the idea'.

mntmoss 7y ago

I call it the method of creating self-feedback. Everyone starts off by using hunches, "taste", and the opinion of the crowd or authorities. But to get beyond that - and getting beyond playtesting, data-collection and other brute force feedback mechanisms entails doing so - one has to systematically devise original feedback signals - pass-fail checklists, writers' rubrics, dependency graphs, workout logs and so on. Once you have the framework in hand and have validated its philosophical premise to some degree, you can feed your work and ideas through it and it automatically corrects you and guides the ideas away from major fallacies. Of course, some amount of experimental data helps, but the huge amounts we have grown accustomed to have a habit of producing a lot of busywork - a product tuned and tweaked and prodded to improve this or that short-term KPI or audience appeal metric - without striking at the critical issues that one can probe with a bit of followthrough on self-feedback.

lonelappde 7y ago

It maybe a worldwide communications ecosystem is a different problems space from a throwaway videogame.