No, no, he&#x27;s done <i>research</i>, right from the start. Says so right on the page titled &quot;design process&quot;.<p>That&#x27;s how he knows, I&#x27;m sure. He wouldn&#x27;t just be making that stuff up out of thin air, and surely the &quot;research&quot; and &quot;design process&quot; did not exclusively consist out of the previous iterations of mockups we can see on that page.<p>Certainly he&#x27;s also written the technical design document that describes a clearly outlined goal at the start, works that out referring to well-known theories, studies and previous research done in the field of UX design.<p>Obviously the statements about efficiency have been corroborated by hard numbers obtained from use cases, user studies--done on people other than himself or his professors--about discoverability, efficiency, employing user tasks and scripts (as described in the literature he must be familiar with). He&#x27;s a student of interaction design on a university. So he must certainly know that research implies science and interaction design involves actual social studies and that building mockups, animations and a gorgeous website with demo video is only a tiny and not even that important part of the field.<p>Certainly it can&#x27;t be that this guy is in fact quite talented at marketing and that&#x27;s why he&#x27;s currently at the top of HN.