For the last four months I worked on idea of very cool project named Things To Be Done(I am going to describe it soon). The idea was born in my mind accidentally and it didn’t look to be promising on money or at least to be attractive for majority of people. So I have started to work on it alone. It’s good that I am kind of self-sufficient person in technology perspective. I know the entire technologies stack: from SQL to HTML/JS. So it allows me to build almost any middle-size application from scratch by myself without any external help. That’s why when I assessed my chances to lead TTBD to the end I hadn’t thought much – almost immediately I started to work on that.
Everything was fine. I liked to work on my idea and it brought me much pleasure. I registered a domain and started to search for a better hosting than the one I have now. From the first days I understood that to lead any idea to the end you need to have as more attractive things in idea as possible. So I decided to use frameworks and technologies where I didn’t have much experience. It affects my desire to learn new things thereby make my idea be more attractive for my mind.
I spent from 3 to 6 hours a day working on TTBD. It took about three months for me to complete entire functional/technical part. And now I am a little bit stocked. It happened that almost for a week I didn’t manage to work on TTBD, so when I came back I found that I don’t like how my project looks like 🙂 I like what it does, but I don’t like its design.
Then I remembered everything I was taught in Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson. The design is the first and implementation is the second. Probably it’s not the majority’s approach but, as I found by myself, it’s right. An engineer serves to designer, not vice versa.
The designer is more important because it builds an experience of end-user; it builds the first sight experience, while programmer makes design work.
The design is based more on emotions than on logic. Emotions are stronger than rational thoughts.
It’s much more pleasant to work with a well-designed solution. It’s better to click on pretty buttons and work in environment of perfectly chosen colors.
Of course, previously mentioned points don’t work for a long run if your application really does nothing or doesn’t have a value. If it’s crappy then it’s crappy. You can’t hold user by making interface prettier, while you do nothing.
So what the conclusion? I think it is to start from design or at least work simultaneously in both sides. The initial user experience is really important.
For me the conclusion is that it seems that I will have to rebuild many things at TTBD after I find a designer and we will come up with some cool design solution.
photocredit – arnoKath