The Value of Experience

Adam Silver has an article titled “Do you trust design advice from ChatGPT?” wherein he prompted the LLM:

How do you add hint text to radio buttons?

It gave various suggestions, each of which Adam breaks down.

Here’s an an example response from ChatGPT:

If you want the hint to appear when the user hovers on the radio button, use a tooltip for a cleaner design

Adam’s response:

‘If you want’

Design is not about what you want. It’s about what users need.

‘use a tooltip’

If a hint is useful, why hide it behind a difficult-to-use and inaccessible interaction?

‘for a cleaner design’

Design is about clarity, not cleanliness.

Adam’s point-by-point breakdowns are excellent.

The entire article is a great example of how plausible-sounding ideas can quickly fall apart under scrutiny from an expert who reframes the issue.

It’s funny how prevalent this feels in our age of fast-paced information overload. You read an argument and it seems rational — that is, if you don’t think about it too long, which who has the time?

But an expert with deep experience can quickly refute these mediocre rationales and offer a more informed perspective that leaves you wondering how you ever nodded along to the original argument in the first place.

Humorously, it reminds me of the culture of conspiracy theories where the burden of proof is on you to disprove the bare assertions being made (a time-consuming job).

Hence the value of experience (and what’s experience but an investment of time?) to pierce through these kinds of middle-of-the-road rationales. Experience helps clarify and articulate what lesser experience cannot see, let alone articulate.

That all leads me back to Adam:

ChatGPT pulls unreliable, uninformed and untrustworthy design advice from the internet and delivers it with confidence.

I mean you can certainly listen to its advice.

But I think it’s better to develop the instinct to ask the right questions and be able to recognise bad advice when you see it.

There’s no shortcut to gaining experience. You can’t consume enough content to get it. You have to do.