The more I talk with people new to the IA/UX/UCD/whatever fields, the more I realise that they just want me to give them a list of ‘rules’ to follow to do good work. It’s not that they are being lazy or not wanting to think, but that their space is somewhere else and they want to be able to cope with ‘our’ space without having to spend a long time learning it & get on with what they need to do. Makes sense…

On my end, the more I learn & work in our field, the more difficult I find it to distil answers into rules/guidelines. As you say, the context is just so important that in order to give some advice on a question, I spend a long time asking contextual questions. The good thing is that, in spending that time discussing the contextual questions, the answer is much more obvious and often just falls out of the context

Everything you have written here also applies to methods/techniques – there is an interest and need for methods and techniques, often as the result of the question of “I need to do something and I need to do it now and I don’t have time to learn everything first”… hence our article about card sorting in the same B&A issue (and the reason that I’m here so close to publishing time and the first to comment here

I agree that the pressure on designers to produce and follow guidelines is mainly external. Certain design guidelines bubble up into the popular consciousness (usually misguided) and then people get the idea that everything can be reduced to the type of rules you learn in driving school. Guidelines are no replacement for design practice and experience, but some managers and decision-makers seem to trust them more than the designers.

In some cases, this can be useful. We have all used published guidelines as a last resort against some kind of folly. But more often than that, I am defending a design against a misinterpreted guideline.