Good Design Through Iteration, Collaboration and Iteration Again
March 17, 2008 at 10:25 pm by Ehab BandarIf there’s one guiding principle of highly effective user-centered design it would have to be persistence. Sure, luck mixed in with good designers and engineers have a lot to do with it, but persistence is often the key ingredient when it comes to rolling out an online application that’s easy to use versus easy to refuse.
Stories abound of Websites rushing to market with scaled back features, interfacing with poorly conceived designs. While the ever present time-to-market is usually the culprit, more often than not it’s the symptom of a broken process, driven more by having something that’s simply good enough.
Compare this with the process employed by Google and Apple, who generally believe that it takes months, sometimes years, of iterating the same design to arrive at a finished product. Take for example the design evolution of Gmail, which went through months of iteration — and is in fact still in Beta — before seeing the light of day. Here’s a firsthand account of the process that shaped it.
What most people don’t know about Gmail, is that Google worked on it for a very long time before releasing it to the world. In fact, we created at least seven distinct versions of the Gmail user interface before the product was ever released. During that time, we experimented with a lot of different interfaces and features, including much of what you see on Gmail today (and some things that never made it into the final product). However, the product never felt “ready” — the features were there, but they were a little awkward and didn’t fit together quite right. Finally, in the later part of 2003, someone new joined the team, a user experience designer named Kevin Fox. Over the course of the next several months, Kevin and the team developed a new Gmail interface (code named “fin”), and finally the features all fit together! That was the interface that we launched with, and to a large extent that is the same interface that Gmail has today (though there have been many improvements).
Note how little deadlines and requirements gathering played a part in the process. Unlike the traditional waterfall project management method, the ideal approach for effective design is usually a variation of the agile method, where iteration, collaboration and further iteration shapes the final product. In another example, an Apple insider explains the design process behind their success:
Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.
The pattern usually repeats itself wherever good design can be had: several designers with diverse backgrounds creating a range of designs that are paired down over time to arrive at a final design direction. But it also explains why it’s so hard to achieve it, and harder still to maintain it as both your customer base and features expand and diversify. For this reason, it takes a lot of persistence and a willingness to pair down ’stuff’ on the screen to expose that thing we all seek: the product’s true essence. Through all that clutter and time, if you’re lucky and willing not to settle, a gem might appear where once there was just noise. In many ways, a good website, like a home, is never done, always changing until a form pleasing to both the occupant and the visitor is achieved.
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