Design of Design - Chapter 12

Brooks begins this chapter by telling us that wise designers begin designing by writing down everything they know and assume about the user, his or her purposes, and his or her methods of use. He says that it is important to write out an explicit list of assumptions when designing in a team; otherwise, all team members might incorrectly believe they all have the same assumptions. However, the author says that the designers will often not know enough to make a complete model of the user, but it forces the designers to ask questions about the user that they might not have asked otherwise. Brooks says that for any questions that can't be answered about the user with a reasonable about of searching, it's perfectly fine to guess. And with that, he gives us the tagline for the chapter: "Better wrong than vague." By this he means that it is better to be wrong about your user than to simply not have enough information about your user.