GK Chesterton once said he owed his success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite. That is often how webmasters and web developers can feel about the ‘advice’ they get from others. They just don’t understand what they are taking about, or what would they know about web design, they’ve probably never even heard of Dreamweaver! These responses are all too common, but that does not excuse their folly. Here’s my piece of advice: The less someone knows about making websites, the more helpful their advice is because they will see things you never will.

Here are some bits of constructive criticism I have received over the years, how I initially reacted to it, and how I eventually learned from it. Continue reading »

You don’t need to know everything. As with any field, there’s a lot you could learn about usability. But unless you’re a usability professional, there’s a limit to how much is useful to learn.

I’ve always liked the passage in A Study in Scarlet where Dr. Watson is shocked to learn that Sherlock Holmes doesn’t know that the earth travels around the sun. Given the finite capacity of the human brain, Holmes explains, he cannot afford to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones:

What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Steve Krug, Don’t Make me Think, 2nd ed. page 6.

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