[Sigia-l] Exhibit A

[Ziya Oz]

Jared M. Spool:

> I've never been a fan of the idea of "Best Practices"

I wish more people would say this more often and publicly, if nothing else,
just so that I don't look like a lone nut job out there and hopefully the
amount of angry off-list email I get from here on this subject subsides a
bit. :-) 

> though it's  one of the things our clients clamor for constantly.

And they do it mostly for three reasons:

Safety in numbers -- If everybody else is doin' it, it must be good, err,
best practice.

Follow the leader -- If, say, Microsoft is doin' it, it must be enterprise
best practice.

CYA -- When the project fails, consequences can't be that bad if everybody
else was doin' it the same way.

In the IT universe, the primary objective of bureaucrats is not to succeed,
but not to fail, and barring that, minimize fallout damage to careers. Risk
aversion raised to a level of art and discipline.

However, some clients genuinely just don't know what to do in a given
context. They are well meaning and have the best interest of the
project/organization in their heart. Naturally one can work with them, even
if they start off the conversation with a gem from, say, Jakob which then
one has to spend countless hours debunking and contextualizing.

Over the years, I can't remember just how many days and weeks I must have
spent with clients deconstructing various Microsoft OS and application UI
and interaction disasters, which they wanted to "borrow" because they
thought it was best practice.

So forgive me when my blood pressure shoots up because this company has the
audacity to "license" their UI but are unwilling to incorporate it into the
OS APIs so that anybody can access them, with one of most absurd and
draconian EULAs ever devised by a tech outfit.

> I think we need to encourage teams to put more measures into place so
> they can tell what works and what doesn't for them, in their own
> context. 

Here we come to the sad and bitter truth. Those who (instinctively)
gravitate towards best practices and decontextualized guidance are very hard
to educate, deprogram and convert. They exhibit similar attitudes outside
the workplace too. Critical thinking and contextual design are already hard
to do so, in my practice, I've learned to ignore and go around them.

> In my opinion, we need to  do some serious research on what those measures
> should be.

Yes. But that's half the problem. People I referred to above will *always*
gravitate towards the simplest, most expedient "solution," and likely call
it best practice or another cover phrase to justify it. You may indeed have
valuable info in a 20 page research, but these people will grab a shiny
nugget (99% Bad) of a sentence and try to fit their context to it.

The urge to not think critically is unbelievably strong. I'm not sure what
to do about it beyond exposing it at every opportunity.


Ziya
Nullius in Verba