I read Erika Hall’s Just Enough Research. I’m not going review the entire book as it feels a bit off-topic for this blog, but the chapter about surveys had me nodding my head so much I’d love to excerpt a few things:

The questions can be asked in person or over the phone, or distributed on paper or collected online. The proliferation of online survey platforms has made it possible for anyone to create a survey in minutes.

This is not a good thing.

Surveys are the most dangerous research tool — misunderstood and misused. They frequently blend qualitative and quantitative questions; at their worst, surveys combine the potential pitfalls of both. […]

If you ever think to yourself, “Well, a survey isn’t really the right way to make this critical decision, but the CEO really wants to run one. What’s the worst that can happen?”

Brexit.

Hall highlights that surveys are much harder to debug than other methods:

It’s much harder to write a good survey than to conduct good qualitative user research—something like the difference between building an instrument for remote sensing and sticking your head out the window to see what the weather is like. Given a decently representative (and properly screened) research participant, you could sit down, shut up, turn on the recorder, and get useful data just by letting them talk. But if you write bad survey questions, you get bad data at scale with no chance of recovery. It doesn’t matter how many answers you get if they don’t provide a useful representation of reality. […] Surveys are the most difficult research method of all.

[…] Bad code will have bugs. A bad interface design will fail a usability test. A bad user interview is as obvious as it is uncomfortable. […] A bad survey won’t tell you it’s bad.

And that they might be seductive because they feel like hard data:

Designers often find themselves up against the idea that survey data is better and more reliable than qualitative research just because the number of people it is possible to survey is so much larger than the number of people you can realistically observe or interview. [… But] unless you are very careful with how you sample, you can end up with a lot of bad, biased data that is totally meaningless and opaque.

There’s also this hilarious bit:

Managers love NPS because it was designed to be loveable by managers. It’s simple and concrete and involves fancy consultant math, which makes it seems special. But is this metric as broadly applicable and powerful as it claims to be?

Nah.

NPS is not a research tool. I shouldn’t even be talking about NPS in a research book.

The entire book is worth a read, with a lot more to offer than the pithy quotes I excerpted above. I really liked its pragmatic approach to research that understands the realities of the industry.

I learned from Diana Berlin’s always excellent newsletter Diagonal that Stewart Brand has a new book out, and it’s about maintenance, and it’s published by Stripe Press. From the introduction:

This book, I’m pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general. It asks: What can be learned if you think about all the varieties of maintenance at the same time? I doubt if there are any non-trivial “laws” of maintenance to be discovered. All I can offer here is to muse across a representative sample of maintenance domains and see what emerges.

Very excited to give it a go, somewhat worried about “Part One” appearing in the title, disappointed in Stripe not caring enough to ask one woman for a blurb.

I read Mike Monteiro’s book of pre-pandemic essays called The collected angers. The book has less to do with the subject of this blog, but I grabbed a few quotes that resonated with me and seemed relevant.

In order not to make it too reductive, I’m also linking to the original essays for those who want to follow up:

The worst feedback you can get from a client is “Wow. It looks like you worked really hard on this!” Stop using your work like a time card. If you did it right, it looks like it was effortless. It looks like it’s always existed. And the client will probably be irritated that they paid you for 30 hours of work to do something that looks like it took an hour. Which it did. They’re just not seeing the 29 hours of bad design that got you to that one hour of good design. And for the love of god, please don’t show them those 29 hours of bad design. A presentation is a shitty place for a sausage-making demonstration, and you’ll just come across as a defensive, unsure person needing validation.

—from 13 ways designers screw up client presentations. This sounds like a version of “My kid could’ve painted that” argument.

Learn how to steal. Be aware of your history. Design is the oldest profession in the world. You’re not the first person to tackle whatever design problem you’re tackling. See how others tackled it. Take the best solutions you find and improve on them. Don’t burn time solving things from scratch. Make use of what others have learned.

—from 10 things you need to learn in design school if you’re tired of wasting your money

The world needs fixing, not disrupting.

—from 8 reasons to turn down that startup job

And:

“The way you get a better world is, you don’t put up with substandard anything.”—Joe Strummer