Ship it!

Hello, my name is Berthold and I used to think design could get in the way of things. This is not geeks anonymous, so I'll keep it brief. The design of this site is not an attempt to portrait my minimalistic streak, far from it. You're looking at about 3 hours worth of work getting the bare bones cobbled together. The logo, the layout sketches, the CSS and html, all of these things have been accomplished in that time frame. We're still missing a lot of things, such as the pictures, the advanced typography, graphical elements, showcases, colour accents, pretty much anything that makes this a design website.

Why, I hear you ask, did I not wait until all that was done to publish?

The truth is: with nerds like me, it never is. Perfectionism is a great tool when you need to spot each and every problem and tackle them all in order. But it prevents us from shipping. We get caught up in minutiae instead of sticking to the bare necessities, because we feel presenting something that isn't perfect is beneath us.

And we're wrong. Tom Wujec recently held a great Talk at the TED conference about a task called the marshmallow challenge: building a tower from spaghetti, yarn and tape. The rules: 18 minutes, and the marshmallow has to sit on top, highest structure wins. Can you guess who won when he presented the challenge to groups of business school graduates and kindergarteners? That's right, the little tykes beat the would-be professional managers handsomely. Why?

Because kindergarteners are not spending much time planning and discussing. They take the marshmallow and figure it out as they go along. Businesspeople, CEOs on the other hand expect a single best plan before they even get to work. They try to execute that strategy and - for lack of engineering skills - only figure out their structure will not be able to support the marshmallow at the very last moment. In this crisis, they will not manage a second attempt. The kindergarteners in the meantime, have gone through several prototypes at this point, seeing immediately what works (stands) and what doesn't. Through this kind of feedback, and without any specialised training, they arrive at the most creative solutions, only being beaten by actual engineers and architects with knowledge of structural integrity.

So the bottom line is this: Don't brood over a project for too long before inviting feedback.

And it's not really to anybodies detriment to let people play around with your prototypes either. If anything, it gives you a direct indication whether the design choices you have made resonate with your target audience. Unless somebody asks for feature A, is it really necessary? Or will it dilute the purpose of the product?

On this website, Harry and I will present articles about our insights into design, business and technology, and show off our work to people we think would care about those sort of things. Our target audience consists of fellow design students (which in my opinion should encompass the entirety of the design community) and people who, liking what we say and do, would like to hire us. Occasionally, we might stumble upon some insights that leave the sphere of our professional competence and become rather philosophical in nature, which might interest people outside of those two groups. But in general I expect we will be catering most to people who are in our niche. We will try to write interesting articles, so how much additional aesthetic incentive is required is certainly up for debate.

That is not to say we are not planning to improve upon the design of harryundberthold.de, quite the opposite. But I am certain that we would do ourselves as well as our audience a grave disservice if we went for mere decoration and Feenstaub.

Next week, I will be going a little more in-depth on how I plan to bring the improvement about. If you have any comments thus far, don't hesitate to let me know via email, and I will post your replies here. Admittedly, that is a downside to shipping early.