Fail fast and cheap
We work in a profession that is challenging. Our work mostly consists of working with pure thought constructs. We build systems in our minds, where each part fits together with other parts and together form a cohesive whole that performs its tasks. This is then translated to something a machine can perform. This is typically done with what we call a programming language. In doing so we take our thought constructs and codify them for the machine to execute. If we do this well, the program will run.
This leaves us with lists like this, where we strive to become ever better. This is good.
The problem of knowing
To truly know something is hard. Increadibly hard sometimes. When I first started out in this field, I ran across some documentation that seemed to make no sense. Something must be wrong with it. Taking it to a senior developer he advised me to test it. His point was that sometimes documentation is wrong, and the only way to know for sure, is to test it yourself. This lead me to a habit of always verifying for myself if something is what I think it is, rather than relying solely on documentation.
The documentation was partly wrong, but I had also misunderstood some parts of it.
Fail cheap
This habit of verifying was expensive at times. Which is why I was delighted when I read Sketching User Experiences. The book deals with how you design user experiences for products that don’t yet exist. The example I like the most in the book is how they designed the TV. Imagine being in a world where there is no TV. How do you go about designing the user experience? You don’t have a phsyical box in front of you. In fact, part of your job is to decide what that physical box will look like. How it will work. How big it is. What colour it is. Etc…
In the book they show how they solved it via cardboard. The built mock TVs, had people act inside of them. All in order to get a feel and understanding of how it would be.
The point the book drives home more than anything else is this: Fail cheaply. Make failure extremely cheap. In the book they make a case for pen and paper being a good first solution for a lot of design decisions. The point being that it’s extremely cheap to make a new sketch.
Only by making the failure cheap, will you be able to iterate on potential solutions fast. Keyword here is potential. We make mistakes, and the faster we fail, the faster we discover those mistakes.
I would put forth this as a contender for the most important thing we can do in how we work. By lowering the cost of failure, we iterate faster, arrive at solutions faster and discover problems faster. If you work on something where everyone is afraid of a mistake because of the cost, work on lowering the cost, or you will be paralyzed to do anything at all.
My $0.02.
