What I Didn't Know Yesterday #11: Design perspectives

It can be helpful to have someone on your design team that really doesn't know too much about what it is you're trying to build. This allows them to bring a different perspective to the process and potentially "think outside the box" that experts can sometimes get themselves trapped in. They can also be a "canary in the coal mine" (now I'm just trying to use as many colloquialisms as possible :P), alerting you to when your designs are getting too complex or you're over-thinking them. After all, the best design is the one that melts away, that is effectively transparent to the user, that is intuitive and, to some extent, completely overlookable. And until you get to that point it is the non-expert -- who doesn't necessarily know what to look for, specifically -- that will most likely be able to continually let you know that there are still improvements that could be made, interfaces that could be simplified, and functionalities that could be streamlined.