consolejockey

I’m sure this has been around for a while, but I just discovered Wikiquote. And today they had a link on their main page to some of Douglas Adam’s more interesting quotes. Here one that stuck out, from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:

“What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?”
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, “What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve learned something about it yourself.

I think this applies to user interface design as well. By the time you take pretty much any process and break down into actions and steps for an end user, you’ve learned a lot about a lot.