False judgements and assumptions
Another reason to move beyond 'face value' is that our underlying assumptions about how a form should look could be wrong. For example, we might look at a form and decide the design is poor because the form is quite long (e.g. 8 printed pages). The underlying assumption here is that the longer a form is, the worse the experience for the form-filler.
Recently, I decided to check a number of such assumptions and was surprised to find that they do not necessarily hold. In fact in some cases, there is an argument for the opposite of what one typically believes.
