CHAPTER 12 The Design of People
My answer has consistently been, “There aren’t any.” Admittedly, it’s
an answer that disappoints. And it may disappoint you as well. It certainly
disappointed me the first time I found myself uttering those words in a
Q&A after one of my talks. But this disappointment — particularly in light
of what we’ve learned about ourselves in this chapter — is as ironic as it is
paradoxical.
We don’t have static best practices that always work in creating
a perfect design or writing perfect code. Instead, we take all of our
knowledge, skills and experiences, and apply them creatively on our
projects. Each situation is different from the next. The reality is that
our field — really, our world — is grossly imperfect and nothing, not
the combined intellect of all its experts or the power of a thousand fire-
breathing dragons, will ever change that. We are constantly updating our
best practices, from those dealing with structuring markup to designing
for a seemingly infinite number of devices — often finding ourselves
exactly where we started. As frustrating as this is at times, we’ve all come
to appreciate it as one of the things that make our work interesting.
In fact, it may even be the source of our happiness. As Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi suggests in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal
Experience, setting goals that are just out of reach and working towards
them is the true secret to happiness. Or as Gandhi put it, “Glory lies in the
attempt to reach one’s goal and not in reaching it.”
All that remains between you and glory is a goal.neXT STePS
I believe our need to find a silver bullet for people problems stems from the
very cognition that paints forgiving self-images and constructs elaborate
theories about the world. But if we’ve learned anything in this chapter,
it’s that our theories and ideologies are often built on shaky foundations,
informed by very little real information, and choreographed by biology
beyond our conscious control. The sooner we can accept that people are