Great Design
Posted by Phil Aaronson at 4:53 PM
I enjoyed Joel Spolsky's Great Design: What is Design? (First Draft) article, but I think what's missing is the single most common reason products lack great design: time.
Companies will often spend an enormous chunk of a new product's development cycle deliberating over what amounts to market positioning. Meanwhile, the clock's ticking and none of that is about building a well designed product. By the time a decision has been made and a consensus reached very little time is left in the schedule. The engineers actually making the product are rarely left much more than what's needed to design and build a first iteration.
Joel writes:
Update [3 Feb 2006]: There appears to be another design abyss: putting forth so much effort that you just can't walk away. The good-money-after-bad abyss? Turning Limitations into Innovation, Marrissa Ann Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience at Google,
Companies will often spend an enormous chunk of a new product's development cycle deliberating over what amounts to market positioning. Meanwhile, the clock's ticking and none of that is about building a well designed product. By the time a decision has been made and a consensus reached very little time is left in the schedule. The engineers actually making the product are rarely left much more than what's needed to design and build a first iteration.
Joel writes:
When you're designing, you're satisfying lots of difficult constraints. One false move, and you fall into the abyss. It's frigging hard to get this right. You think I know how to solve the Motorola RAZR phone power-switch button? Heck no! I'm sure that the design team over there spent weeks working on this.That's possible I suppose, but my guess? The problem with the RAZR phone's on/off button was not caused by falling into that abyss. The one where you agonize over the design and fail to satisfy lots of conflicting constraints perfectly after weeks of work. Instead it was most likely a design flaw either missed or allowed to ship because of schedule demands. They fell into that other abyss, they ran out of time.
Update [3 Feb 2006]: There appears to be another design abyss: putting forth so much effort that you just can't walk away. The good-money-after-bad abyss? Turning Limitations into Innovation, Marrissa Ann Mayer, vice-president for search products and user experience at Google,
... people working on it have spent so much time and are so personally invested that it's too painful to walk away. They often know the project is misguided, yet they see the effort through to the painful, unsuccessful end. That's why it's important to discover failure fast and abandon it quickly. A limited investment makes it easier to walk away and move on to something else that has a better chance of success.
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