As I’ve been catching up on the app challenge this week, a phrase keeps coming to mind:
Perfect is the enemy of done Source: Unknown
Which is a slight twist on Voltaire's "Perfect is the enemy of the good” directed at people who never show their work due to fear of it not being perfect.
Working my way through designing the features that I want to include in the app it feels like this phrase has kept me honest.
A sidenote to cynics
In the startup world, the phrase above can be interpreted by some people to mean they can just ship crap, and let their users deal with this.
If you take a look about my initial thinking around the project, you’ll notice that I'm not down with that worldview - I’m keen to get to my earliest testable product, to then get to my earliest usable product, and finally my earliest loveable product before I launch.
Choices to make
I’ve recently been fairly restricted on time available to put into the app (all self-inflicted of course!) so keeping focussed on what is necessary has been really helpful this week.
With the mobile wireframes now about 80% of the way there I have a few choices over what I do next.
Do I:
- finish the last 20% of the wireframes and focus on minute details?
- design the desktop version of the wireframes?
- flesh out the mobile wireframes with design detail?
- make a prototype of the mobile wireframes, and test them with a few friends to see if I’ve missed anything or made any major assumption mistakes?
- just get developing and building the thing?
What would you do at this point?
This isn’t a trick question - it's one I often ask myself at each major stage of a project; in the context of the current project what makes the most sense to keep things moving forward, with an eye on minimising waste, and leading towards some kind of success?
Getting to done
As a solo founder / builder I’m keen to reduce the chance of waste and the best way I’ve learned to help with that over the years is to get a project in the hands of users as soon as possible.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth Source: Mike Tyson
With that in mind this coming week will be focussed on getting my wireframe designs into some kind of prototype form and into the hands of some people to get their response & feedback as soon as possible.
At this point, the user testing is going to be fairly generic as I’m not concentrating on a specific task or goal, but to see if the concept makes sense and feels like it could be useful/usable.