Yup, this goes for all tools in our toolbox. You can slam a hammer because you nailed your thumb with it, but it's still the best tool to put nails in place!

Hope that analogy drove my point home!

Totally agree — too much focus on what is or isn't right, not enough on encouraging designers to build their own 'judgement muscle', and to apply that in each situation.

I actually wrote a post on this last year: Building the Judgement Muscle (Medium)

A relevant snippet:

From sketching to Sketch-ing, mocking-up to coding-up, the community has been flooded with opinions and best practices about which tool or technique to use, how, and when. If you’re just getting into the industry, it’s got to be a little daunting. From speaking to new designers, it seems the current zeitgeist has created the impression that there’s a right way to approach a problem (and with that comes the implication that there’s a wrong way). Attempts to avoid the wrong approach are leading us to focus on how to design, instead of what (or even why, but more on that another time).

Okay, it's not an article but actually a video of a conference talk...

https://vimeo.com/115154289

The speaker is Bret Victor, and his talk is called "The Humane Representation of Thought". At its core, he asks the question: how can we design modern computer representations of our mental models (especially at work), while always remembering that we're designing for real-life flesh-and-blood human beings.

Human beings are animals. We have eyes that get tired, and legs that cramp, and ears that can only hear certain kinds of sounds. We have to sleep for 8 hours every day, and we have to eat food a few times every day or else we get cranky. And this recognition and understanding of our humanity can inform the way we design our work-surfaces and work-products.

To me, this recognition of our humanity is the central premise of "design thinking", and everything else we do as designers should be in service of that goal.

Enjoy!

Just a couple weeks ago, I had convinced my team to try out a GV Design Sprint. We were on day 1 and it was going pretty well. I browse the internets during lunch break and see a freshly published article: "Google Design Sprints are Snake Oil."

smdh.

Well said. Any creative tool is only as good as the collective judgement of the people using it in the first place. Teams that don't have a strong bond, shared goals, and mutual respect will always churn out crap whatever tools they use. Its crazy how many companies try to fix poor relationships with software tools.

I had the same urge to write something like this after reading the Invision blog the other day. I couldn't believe that the author (or someone proofreading) didn't recognize that the problem being described had nothing to do with personas but that those who created them openly admitted "we made them up". I'm all for opposing points of view but this was one of the more ignorant things I've ever read.

I don't think we realize the gravity of the internet being used as a platform to spread our ideas far and wide. It can have some really powerful and not always positive consequences when opinions can be thrown out across the world in an instant.

Company: "We came up with these personas ..."

Company: "We do Agile Design..."

Company: "Let's increase our UX..."

Company: "Empathy"

I completely agree with you. The tools that have survived throughout the decades, probably has done so because they have been proven useful.

The wave of hot takes on why you shouldn't use established tools are really a weird phenomena though. I feel like it's often just people trying to come up with click-baity articles – since so much has been said on why personas (or whatever they might be bashing) are useful, the easy route to generate an intersting headline is to just find a flaw of the method and blow it out of proportion, letting people know that that specific flaw is not only making you do a worse job, but also ruining your muffins in the oven, making your skin dry and making America less great.

Or whatever.

I thought I am only one, who hates short, bold and articles considering only one side of a thing. I would rather suggest you, to look for long-reeds, where writer have a place to consider both sides of the same coin.

I do feel bad for anyone starting out in any profession that has to deal with this kind of gatekeeping, particularly when it comes to tools. Likewise, this sort of culture actually influences young designers to become hyperbolic in order to make a name for themselves because that's what the cranky old men on Twitter do.

Though this will never change, I think it's important to keep tabs on your signal v noise ratio and keep challenging your cognitive biases as much as possible. It's still super important to weigh the pros and cons: in fact, before I use a tool or even buy a book, I like to read the bad reviews first. All encompassing positivity and participation ribbons isn't helpful to anyone either.

But, articles written by well-known companies and designers that shit on tools that actually do a pretty good job at ensuring a decent design as long as you use them correctly, are damaging to the design community, especially designers new to the industry. These articles limit new designers' perceived options for solving a problem, because of another team's failure to utilize a tool correctly.

This seems like a pretty weaselly argument to me.

You've already decided that celebrity elites are shitting on your preconceived notions, and you're angry that their opinions are wrong.

Damaging to the community? Really?

If these people are wrong then they're nothing more than mistaken. Their opinions are down on paper and ready to be challenged in the marketplace of ideas. Presuming that a tool can't be flawed is just as narrow an outlook.