I saw a video earlier today titled “Great Ideas are a Dime a Dozen” and I just loved it. Unfortunately it’s a Microsoft internal-only video so I can’t post it here but I can point to some related talks and videos. The speaker was Bill Buxton of Microsoft research.

I fell in love with this talk for a variety of reasons: 1) I love and agree with the principle that ideas are cheap but it’s the communicating of the ideas and making them real that is truly hard and where the greatest talent is required. 2) He argues that you need to get a user experienced running quickly and you need to keep it evolving quickly. You need a lightweight experimentation platform to take the user experience from good to great.  I’ve long believed that the difference between the iPhone and some other designs is not being satisfied when it’s “done” and, rather than triaging to ship, just keep polishing.  Get it running, then get it better. Then throw it out and try again.  Change it some more.  Get it 100% functionally correct and as good as you can possibly get it. Then keep polishing. Polish and refine further, and 3) he points out that we never have time to properly invest in design at the beginning when the team is small. Yet, we DO have time to be months or even years late partly as a consequence of not doing the design up front.  Late projects are when the team is fully staffed and at its biggest and most expensive.  Neither he nor I are arguing for waterfall design.  What’s Bill is arguing for is human centric design up front.  Ray Ozzie calls this experience-first design.  Invest in really getting the experience fully understood with super lightweight development methods.  If you REALLY understand the user experience and it’s really right, developing the product may be the easiest and perhaps most predictable part of the process.  I’ve seen large software teams working on an ill-defined and only barely designed products more than once.  As an industry, we need to take some of Bill’s advice.

Bill’s talks and videos are posted at: http://www.billbuxton.com.  The closest external example of the video I’m describing above is perhaps: What if Leopold Didn't Have a Piano.  Recommended whether you are a designer or a developer.

                                                --jrh

James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
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