You know that feeling when you know someone very well and you buy them a present? You know they will love it and you are excited at the very thought of their delight? Part of you is a little scared though. A few butterflies in the stomach. What if I have misread? What if they don’t like it?
I listened to someone speak recently who said that one thing he had learnt in his IT career was that the first time you do anything it will be wrong.
I disagree.
Rolling out a new database for a website, for example, can be done right first time. Be clear on what the old one does, write some tests, test the tests, make a rollback plan, test that. Make the new database. Research, plan, build, test, execute. The occasional hardware failure or act of god notwithstanding, everything is likely to work very smoothly and you can sit back and have a celebratory mojito.
I like mojitos.
Certainty isn’t always possible. Let’s aim for confidence.
1. Understand your users. No, don’t simply survey them, understand their underlying needs, behaviours; embrace that information, it will be the difference between functional and delightful. Think about how you ask the questions and make sure you understand the answer.
2. Understand the underlying objectives of the product, service, project you are setting out to design. These might be your objectives, your employers, your clients. Make sure you are clear on these factors.
3. Understand the competitor landscape: what might your users have learnt from them? What can you learn from them? What is food for ideas and what is noise?
4. Understand existing design principles, patterns and rules. Experiment, invent, play but remember that these are part of your toolbox.
5. Understand your need for testing. Test an idea. Test a sketch. Test a prototype. Test again. Be humbled again and again by all the assumptions you have made without realising. Be clear on what you are testing and why. Designing the test is a key part of the process.
6. Understand the limitations of the technologies you are working with. By all means push the limits. Reality checks are enormously important because poor execution of even the most brilliant design will undermine the user experience of it. You need to make sure your understanding matches that of the people who will be putting it together.
7. Understand the need to throw bad ideas away. They are fun. You should play. Test them. Understand why they are wrong and ditch them. Ideas are cheap.
8. Understand what is good about a design. Understand why. Add to it, improve on it, add it to your toolbox, move on. Good ideas are as cheap as bad ones.
Test, repeat, improve.
Perfection is elusive. Have a mojito, sometimes it helps.
Last night a Brompton saved my life*
To give context to this story you need to know two things about me:
1) I am a commuter. I live in Brighton and work in London which means that I have a one hour train journey at the start and end of each working day.
2) I like cycling. I have used a bicycle as my main mode of transport (where reasonable) since I was about 17. I love the freedom of getting around on a bicycle, especially in a city like London. There is no denying the dangers but whizzing about on a bicycle is a feeling I love.
I have worked in London on and off since about 1999 and have been doing this train commute for so long that, when I started, they still had guards vans where you were allowed to stack your bikes. Ah, the good old days, when the trains were a little draftier but the train never had to be ‘rebooted’ in order to get the doors to open; handles we used to call them – crazily effective.
I digress.
My current commute means a 12 minute walk (personal best) to the station, approximately one hour on the train, and then approximately 20 – 25 minute walk to my desk.
Or it did.
I have been eyeing up these Bromptons for years – silly looking things with their tiny wheels – “that isn’t a proper bicycle” I kept telling myself, “not like my road bike. Pah!” I have stared at, and talked about, pretty much every kind of folding bike there is. A few of my geekier bike friends have ‘dissed’ the Brompton, people have suggested having a cheap bike one end, cheap bike the other …
And then Dom let me borrow his Brompton.
Bromptons are fucking amazing.
The gearing is brilliant so you can get up some decent speed, the bike might be all small and low to the ground but you feel upright and visible, you can fold them in seconds, and they fold up small. Brilliant. They are made by a UK company who have kept all production in the UK so, while that is most certainly reflected in the price, you do get a bit of ‘warm and fuzzy’ for supporting local industry.
They are a little heavier than I am entirely comfortable with (number 3 I forgot to mention is that I have a rather dodgy back) and I did need to be shown how to go through the fold/un-fold routine which took a few goes to get down to professional commuter speeds.
I do not need to check out the competition, I love it!
I have reduced my commute by about 40 minutes a day and, instead of frantically trying to walk stupidly fast, I get to race through the streets of London, yelling at the occasional pedestrian, smiling smugly at the people stuck in traffic and I just love the downhill bit from the station on my way home. By the time I walk through my door I might look a bit windswept but any remnants of the days’ annoyances have been dispatched! Folded up it fits on the train, in the office, a taxi, the pub – wherever I go, it does.
Mine arrives in 4 weeks!
Bright orange – I didn’t want to waste an opportunity to give a little nod to my favourite open source operating system – and I went for the 6-speed, titanium option. Well, Brighton is rather hilly and I do have to look after my back you know!
*Note: Obviously it didn’t literally save my life and it wasn’t last night but the tune stuck in my head so I used it.