This evening Kynthia‘s thoughts got me thinking. Among other things, she said:

“[W]e design heads get in this place where, just because we wouldn’t be caught dead releasing something into the wild, we think there is nothing to learn from it.”

My brain took her thoughts on a tangent and went this way:

So since I started my job at ThoughtWorks, my role has pretty much been defined by this exact issue. See, we use agile development methods, which often means that the stuff I’m designing might be built tomorrow, or at the latest in the next few weeks, which leads to some pretty interesting questions, such as:

• If I had to hand over my design in the next [time limit], what would be the most important part(s) to get across? So what should I spend my time on?
• How can my design(s) make the greatest impact in the short run?
• How can my design(s) be flexible enough that they’ll support more advanced interactions and further redesign (without simply adding features) in the long run?
• How much does my design cost, in terms of real dollars and development time? Is there anything I can do to make it less expensive without hurting the users (too much)?
• Will the brilliant, awesome, amazing design I’ve just created embrace change if it turns out users really don’t like something about it? Or will it fail miserably…which might be a good thing if it motivates the product owners to spend more money to fix it.

Indeed, I believe us “design heads” need to wrap our brains around the idea that the “ideal design solution” can be super-difficult, and sometimes impossible to implement, if for no other reason than the person with the money doesn’t feel like splurging for a great user experience. Given this situation, it’s important that we release our ideas into the world early and often, even if they aren’t perfect. Putting our ideas out into the world lets them get stomped on, beat up, and improved to the point where while they may not be ideal, they’ll at least be better.

Iteration, baby, that’s the name of the game. It turns out when we designers draw and write and specify and prototype and mock-up our designs in our oh-so-ritualistic way, we end up with an unintended by-product: intimidation. See, even if our brilliant, perfected ideas aren’t intimidating to the teams of programmers that have to build them, they’ll often be super-intimidating to those who have to pay for them. See, the more realistic/difficult/etc. our designs look on paper or other prototyped form, the higher the perceived cost. Let’s look at a formula to really help this sink in:

C(p) = -I(L)

Now, I haven’t taken a math class in years, so that formula probably means nothing at all. Ignore it for now. What I mean to say is that the higher the perceived cost, the lower the likelihood of implementation. This all seems pretty simple, and it is, but sometimes it’s hard for us designers to break away from the idea that we need to perfect everything about our concepts. In fact, when we do this, it can be to our disadvantage.

Oh, and don’t think we’re not intimidating ourselves either! When was the last time you decided not to take on some project just because you knew it would take too long to really “do it right?” Yeah, it happens to me all the time too. We designers know how to intimidate ourselves as well.

So rather than perfecting, why don’t we try biting off just a little bit at a time? Design in terms of small, implementable, simple solutions to the problem at hand. Then expand on the concepts, and build them all the while…just a little at a time. Sure, some of that implementation will have to be redone as you go, but if it truly improves the end design, do it.

Of course, when you’re designing and building an enterprise level application, there’s a lot more structure and process that has to be involved in design, but I think for Kynthia’s case, an Agile development process is somewhat ideal. It gives you the opportunity to take a stab at a problem, implement something simple, learn from what you built/pondered/etc., and iterate.

Anyway, sorry for taking your thoughts on a tangent, Kynthia, but thank you for getting my brain cranking this evening. 🙂