Looking at a paint chip on its own isn’t nearly as informative as looking at it next to another paint chip.
Benefiting from bad design
Where are the walls?
The other day, I met with some members of an undergraduate engineering design team. They had asked if I would meet with them, because they wanted some guidance on whether to keep going or give up on their current design for a heliostat.
A design team usually answers to a customer. Sometimes, the customer is a manager in the company. Sometimes, it’s an outside person or organization. It’s the interplay of design team and customer that determines what will be counted as a successful completion of the project. When the design team comes up with an idea and presents it to the customer, the customer might say, “Sorry. That won’t work for us.”
The customer helps provide the walls inside of which the magic happens.
I asked the undergraduate design team to whom they had to deliver their product, whether as a design or in the form of a working prototype. I asked who their customer was. The answer they gave explained why they had sought me out for help. “We don’t really have a customer,” the members said. “We used to, but now we don’t.”
With no customer, it’s very difficult to figure out where the walls are. And before you have walls, it’s very difficult to focus your work into magic.
So that’s the direction I sent them. I showed them a creativity tool a group could use to help it map out the walls for itself. It’s hard work, especially for a relatively large design group, but it’s a way forward.
Design for testability and maintenance
Photo: hoyasmeg
If you’re in a long-term relationship with your website, design for the future.
Slabs under houses, wiring and plumbing behind walls…I’m not a construction contractor, so I can’t tell you why it’s done this way, but I can tell you what mystifies me about these construction methods: they make it hard to fix things.
Our new house is built over a crawl space and a partial, unfinished basement. It may not be the prettiest place down there, but it is possible to get at things that might need to be inspected or fixed eventually.
In a foundation slab with plumbing (or who knows what else) embedded in it, access isn’t nearly as straightforward and is much more painful to contemplate.
Imagine a house where there are panels you could remove (without a jackhammer, I mean) to get at the wiring or plumbing anywhere in the house. Cleverly camouflaged, narrow (but not too narrow) panels running floor to ceiling, between floors, between rooms.
Now imagine all of the wiring and plumbing itself being constructed of modular components that could be swapped out when necessary.
It would take some foresight and up-front planning to design this way. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to enjoy the benefits?
Web design is frequently done under a lot of time pressure and with a flood of incoming information, ideas, and design requirements. In putting your own site together, be good to your future self: spend some time up front thinking about how you’re going to test and maintain the site and how you can make it easy to change layout or other aspects of the site later. You won’t be able to plan or execute this perfectly, but even some efforts along these lines may save you your sanity down the line.
What have you learned to do (probably learning the hard way) in designing your websites? Please share your strategies in the comments.