Design research is great for improving existing product categories but essentially useless for new, innovative breakthroughs.

Added to korrents 6 Sept 2026 · How quotes work · Something wrong? Tell us

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• In tension with

  The more your target audience does not look like you, the more you should be skeptical of your design intuition.

  Norman says design research is essentially useless for new, innovative breakthroughs, however good it is at improving an existing category. Zhuo says the less your audience looks like you, the more you should distrust your own intuition — which is an argument for research exactly where your instincts are least reliable. Both are true only if breakthroughs must be designed for people like the designer.

Shared subject first, then similar wording. They may agree or disagree.

• A baby-step version of eval-driven design is to sketch out 10 to 20 hero flows and run the feature or interaction through them to see where it falls apart. EBEd Bayes9 Sept 2026design
• A blank chat box is lazy: it violates the first rule of a good user experience, that it is obvious what you can do. JZJulie Zhuo12 May 2025design
• A company deserves everyone in it, the chief executive included, to spend as much time as possible in their zone of genius — which is an org design problem. RVRahul Vohra23 Mar 2025design
• A company hiring a designer is not hiring a politician or spokesperson, so it should just get into the design work. DMDanny Martinez29 Sept 2026design
• A company that adopts AI tools without changing its organisational design misses the biggest change under way. EVElena Verna10 Sept 2026design

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