Half of these are just wrong. The other half are just irritating.
For example, how are these wrong or irritating?
"Ask a person to draw the screen from memory and only the most important things will be remembered"
"Users always come with feedback in the form of solutions, not problems. Try to understand root issues."
"Try it and look at the data for decisions. Don't be attached to your decision"
Is it irritating because you find these obvious? I could see that. But the same way I know I should exercise more, eat better and sleep more, while still not doing it, it's always good to hear/read good advice again and again.
What we remember is different to what we want if we need it. "important" isn't specific enough. Who is it important to? In what context?
Should we also ask a hacker to write down the keyboard short cuts from emacs they remember and get rid of the rest of them?
I'm not going to get into an argument, but hopefully you can see why I made the comment.
That's exactly the point. Isn't that something the GoDaddy designer(s) should know and take into account? They want people buying domain names, not drooling.
Again with GoDaddy, do you want a sexy brand image, a lead gen wet dream, people to quickly buy domain names in bulk, etc.? I completely agree that "important" isn't specific enough but it's up to you, as the designer, to figure out the balance.
Either you love 'nuggets' of "wisdom" like this, or you hate them.
It might have also been the [tweet] spam buttons that got on my nerves (Makes you tweet out the 'nugget' with a bitly link back to the page).
I think that was axod's main problem with the article.
See: $300 purses, $250 running shoes, $1500 Business class tickets.
"Never go with your first instincts."
Google "Always go with your first instincts" = About 50,800 results.
Google "Never go with your first instincts" = About 7 results.
It's just 37signals being contrarian, pretty much their MO.
The context was that our first instinct in a specific situation was to solve a much bigger problem than we needed to. Had we followed that instinct we'd have gone down the wrong road. What was better was to challenge that initial instinct and ask "What's the real problem here? How can we solve the most important part of that real problem as quickly and simply as possible? Maybe that'll be all we need to do." It turned out that was exactly what we needed to do.
First instincts often see big huge pictures. We've found that challenging that initial instinct helps us find the little piece of the big pie that is really in need of a solution.
For me the most valuable thing was really writing out the story of the site & simple mocks before you start building.
Trying to do more of that now.
It's a bunch of platitudes. Nothing straightforwardly false, but in such high doses? Smug and vacuous.
The one-liners are useless. The experience that led to them (which was, no doubt, shared at the "masterclass") is priceless.