We’re well known for iterating on Revisu quickly, both in terms of design and in terms of building a product. We get asked a lot about how to iterate quickly on product, and we’ve realized that a lot of the principles we apply to building Revisu can be applied to iterative design!
Iterating quickly is pretty easy to do, you just have to change the way you think about your design process a little bit. Here’s a few things we keep in mind while we’re building or designing something iteratively.
Don’t be afraid of being wrong
Fear of being wrong is the biggest barrier to moving quickly for so many reasons that there could be (and probably is) a book written on it. It’s amazing the things humans can justify, and in this scenario most of the time wasted is on trying to justify why your experiment, design, or what-have-you failed. So, the sooner you can get comfortable with failure the faster you’ll move.
Failure in your work is not a personal failure.
Keeping this in mind helps keep emotion out of the picture, which keeps you from attempting to justify your failure.
Be lean: Design, Measure, Learn–and fast
The beautiful thing about this cycle is that it’s only bound to your skill, so it gets faster as you get better at it.
Design
Only ever take your designs as far as you’re reasonably sure you need to. Important distinction: reasonably sure you need. This is a bit counter intuitive compared to the traditional lean mentality which says you should be very sure that you’re building (or designing) the right thing out of the gate.
Our take on this is that whatever you’re designing it’s probably wrong anyway, and the only way to know succinctly is to have something to show someone.
Measure
Once you’re getting close to being “done,” show your clients and your friends what you’ve built–get it in front of as many reasonably qualified people as possible. Get their honest feedback by literally telling them that you want to make something they think is awesome. If it’s a client, be clear that it’s a work in progress but you want to make sure you’re on the right track. Tools like Revisu can help here!
You should be able to get an idea as to whether or not you’re on the right track from these conversations in aggregate.
Learn
Learning in this context is probably 60% qualitative, 40% quantitative. If data is available about a specific feature or piece, interpret it quantitatively first, then integrate those results in to your qualitative analysis of the whole damn thing.
When people learn about lean, they expect a quantitative process to findings, but it’s really quite qualitative. You can collect data via A/B or split testing, or surveying, but the interpretation of it almost always ends up being qualitative because . This is especially OK in design, because there should be a bit of gut feeling involved anyway!
More projects, done faster, with happier clients.
This process should help you get your work done quickly and keep your clients happier. It’s worked for Revisu to this point and countless software projects in terms of building and design!
Revisu 