Feb
05
2008You’re Paying for What Gets Thrown Out
05
2008
A while back, when press coverage of the Hollywood writers’ strike was in full swing, a writer was asked why it takes a staff of so many writers, taking such a long time, for so much money, to come up with something as short as a late night monologue. His response was: “You’re paying for the jokes that aren’t on the show”. Writing comedy’s not easy. Trying really hard to come up with five perfect jokes is far less effective than brainstorming 100 and throwing out 95 of them.
There’s a perfect parallel here with UI design. Whereas the art of programming typically involves working in a “5 steps forward, 1 step back” process, the good UI designer will know when something’s not coming together correctly, and do the right thing by throwing out the entire design and starting over. It’s more like five steps forward, five steps back, six steps forward, six steps back - repeatedly starting from zero, but each iteration benefiting from knowledge gained in the previous one.
A good UI design is one in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. No amount of tweaking will repair a UI that has gone too far down the wrong path. If your UI designer isn’t throwing out (a lot) more designs than they’re showing you, they’re not trying hard enough.
The creators of the forthcoming OS X personal task manager, “Things” have written a great blog post describing this phenomenon. In the process of designing a single dialog box, they threw out dozens of possible options (they actually display 38 of them). And this was for something that’s already been done (a dialog for entering recurring events on a calendar), which they just wanted to do better. Had they been designing something that’s never been done, there would likely have been a lot more.
So, the next time someone spends two weeks designing a single mockup, thank them. Remember you’re paying them for knowing what to throw out.