Rapid Creative Design - Does It Make The Experience Better?

In the past two weeks, we have been heads down on a project at Manage My Home that will greatly improve the way in which we help people truly Get It Done as part of our new to do list capability.

However, after being heads down means real-time collaboration, change on the fly, creative and wireframe development being done simultaneously, engineering estimates and planning being done in a room thats beginning to get stale - you step back and say, is this going to make it better?

I've come to a tentative conclusion -- all things in life are subject to change (well, many things).  Rapid, deep collaboration will take a product experience to a much better level on the broad brush strokes of the experience but when you get to refining the experience, the beauty in detailed design, detailed engineering and detailed execution needs focus and time.

Our current example is the to-do list.  We prototyped the basic work design and elements of that experience in less than two weeks and had the outlines of exactly what we have implemented.  The teams were highly collaborative, engaged in a way that limited distraction and the experience was put in front of users with a lot of great feedback.

We then took a few weeks after that to let the practitioners architect, refine, design the details -- and bring it back together.  This gave people the mental breathing room they needed to add the details like simple drag-and-drop, the ease of adding the to-do, the simple ability to get help but not have it distract the user if it wasn't needed.  These details, that also provide the hint of delight, emerge after the intense collaboration in the stillness of a practioner doing the work of their discipline. 

After this experience, and many others like it, we have moved to a more consistent way of working.  It beings with an intense explosion of collaboration across the product creation disciplines followed by a time of quiet detailed refinement.  We aren't perfect at it -- and sometimes the intense collaboration feels like what used to be called fire-drills -- but it is getting us closer to a better way to deliver great experiences through a rapid design process.

In the spirit of always challenging our work and making it better, I would love to know how you do it!  Let us know your ideas.

- Jim, Chief Home Manager

Comments

[twitter.com/ddemulling]

Truly different work activities and skills. Concepts - collaborative idea generation. Detail design - focused requirements and documentation.