Usability Design Tip: Do It Over

by Bob Stein (stein@visibone.com)

One of the most powerful strategies for designing a highly usable Web site is the wise and courageous timing of a redesign. The idea will face horrendous resistance from colleagues, benefactors, and your own pride and urge to pull weight. To start over is to admit failure and requires working hard just to get back to where you started. It's about the most dismal turn a project can take other than abandonment.

These obstacles are not without good reason. It's tremendously expensive to start a project over. Companies fail because of it. It usually takes desperation, a neglectful boss, or a lapse into mania to happen at all.

I suggest it could be the natural course of wise design. The best way to learn how to do something really right is to do it wrong while doing your best. The more complex a project, and the deeper the unknowns, the better the chance that hindsight and horizontal thinking will turn up significant opportunities.

"Good design is transparent. It's so good you can't see it."
—Justin Fox

Your site's usability will never be great and fluid, it will never disappear, recede into the cozy subconscience until you thoroughly grasp the sphere of issues. The best way to get to that kind of mastery is to work through the whole subject. Thinking and talking and waving hands only goes so deep. Getting something to work pushes your mind into all kinds of important nooks and crannies that you couldn't begin to anticipate.

"The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first."
- Blaise Pascal

This is especially true in light of the greatest usability trainer of all: users. Users outnumber designers and developers by orders of magnitude. That fact alone should leave no doubt as to who your real experts are. If you're making a Web site, or any product, you will never know it as thoroughly and as practically as your users.

It's not until something is usable at all that you can get the real experts in on the usability design. 

The Great Usability Paradox; you can't start your project until you've finished your project. The only way out of this dilemma is a second chance. So, just do it over.

In case the picture is too schmaltzy so far, here are some other pitfalls in doing a project over:

• Starting over too early. Getting to the end gives you a more thorough tour. A perfectionist musician might start the song over at every mistake. After much effort, all the skill is in the beginning; still bad as ever on the ending. Better to play all the way through each iteration. In the long run, a few thorough retries might be faster than a dozen fits and starts.
• Disingenuous rehearsal. Not taking the first "try" seriously could bleed away a lot of its power. If you plan from the start to do over, things will naturally become casual or rushed, missing out on the penetrating attention that only comes with purpose.
• Never finishing anything. Starting over often enough is also a great way to make sure you never accomplish anything useful, or at least to mask incompetence.

Therefore, some serious leadership, commitment and self-mastery will be required of all team members to pull this off. Ok, I know, but rather than blow the idea off entirely, you could do what I did. Get some practice with something you love doing: A Labor Of Love. Something you can be obsessed with beyond all rational justification.

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