wild chocolate

Software should be more like Cirque du Soleil

I recently attended a traveling Cirque du Soleil performance called “OVO” which was an insect themed performance. If you haven’t seen a Cirque du Soleil performance before, you must go because they are fantastic! When you arrive, you enter a humongous tent and are immediately transported to this bizarre kind of circus that’s all grown up. The costumes are incredible, the music is live and fantastic, the sets are extravagant and capturing, and the performers are amazingly talented. It’s a great experience. But the thing that really sets a performance like that apart are the details. Nothing was overlooked! From the elaborate costumes to the scenery, to the pre and post show entertainment, you could tell that someone had been over everything with a fine tooth comb. Naturally, I related this to software.

Great software is all about the details too. It’s the little things that picky development teams refuse to overlook, that really make a user’s experience with software exceptional as opposed to just fine or average. Certain personalities tend to be more detail-oriented than others, but I find that developers seem to be more often than not, concerned about the details.

With so many apps out there these days, it takes more than just functionality to make your products stand out. I think the details take you that extra mile. You don’t just throw fields onto an editing screen and call it a day. Even if it’s just simple text input, you really have to think about the layout, the appropriate width and height, is this blue the right blue, how strong should the font be, etc. We can’t afford to forget the user’s interaction at every level. If you’re writing low-level code, think about performance considerations. Could the user experience a slow down with a large data set? Think about your team as well. Who may have to work in this code file in the future? Is your code clear, organized, and concise? The more details you take the time to really consider, the better!

Ok, wait. By now, you must be thinking in the back of your head, “That’s great and all, but then I would never ship! Who has the time to leave no stone unturned in their app?” Yeah, I don’t either. And I certainly have not mastered this balance yet.

Here are some of the ways my team currently manages this dilemma:

- Make small adjustments/improvements in incremental releases (the first release cannot be perfect, but over time will get better)

- Prioritize tickets regularly to sort out the most important issues to the user, and which tickets can wait a little longer (we think about a ticket as must-have/nice-to-have/ or should consider)

- Never create a new UI without showing at least one other person, preferably several, for critiques and improvements

- Capture all ideas for improvements so that they are not overlooked or forgotten

- Use mockups! Even if it’s just a piece of paper or scribbles on a chalkboard. It’s amazing what you can eliminate before you even begin coding if you do this often.

- Test! This is one area that we are trying to improve on my team. It’s so critical to have others test out your changes before you send them out to the world. Catch as much as you can before it gets out there.

If you’ve never looked back at a feature you did and said… “Wow, was I drunk when I did that?!” then you deserve an award. For everyone else, I think it’s important that you’re willing to go back and re-work a feature (even if it seems minor) when it’s just not right. If you’re satisfied with mediocrity, then by all means leave it. But you are taking a big risk that users will overlook the details too. My guess is they won’t.

Right now, I have so many things I want to improve about the product I work on that it can seem overwhelming at times. The steps above seem to help break it down into manageable pieces. Just saying it’s good enough, though, will not allow any product to stand out. Details, details, details.

 

 

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