Stop Redesigning... Rapidly Evolve Your Design | Hacker News Reader

Stop Redesigning... Rapidly Evolve Your Design

martinizer.com

4 pointsmartinshen3 comments

i like the idea of this. however, in practice i don't know how to implement it or draw the line between "enough iterations" and too much time spent on iterations.

Right now, with a small, strapped team, my primary problem is finding enough hours to do all the tasks necessary.

As a result, while the idea of slowly evolving the design to let customers ease into it sounds good, I'm willing to shock my users into a radically different design in order to save development hours.

My userbase, in particular is the sort that (I believe) won't dramatically change engagement based on most designs (untested, and now that I write that, ludicrous sounding, should test). Additionally, for early stage startups (at least Rocket Lease stage startups), the total user count is very low and the alienation risk carries a small absolute penalty relative to the time sacrifice of incremental evolution.

tldr: article acknowledges that there is a time penalty for an incremental design evolution. this is in contrast to the typical time BENEFIT to iterative programming approaches. i suspect that many early stage startups can't afford the time cost, so interface iteration is an important tool, but not to be used by everyone.

I may not have made this as clear but with most product development, continually evolving/iterating design may in fact be key to your startup's success (though it may not in your case). Careful evolutions to product education may give you better insight as to what changes to the interface matter to your user.

Early stage startups tend to constantly "redesign" everything where in fact evolving your design to the desired spot is a more educated approach.

i certainly agree that design iteration is important at certain stages.

when you're going from "black and white wireframe" to "something userfacing" for example, you probably don't have to care; but with an established userbase that is USED to the product, you should care more.

if your product is transactional and there aren't good alternatives (people come to site X to send money to another person and this is the only one with an API) you might not need to care, vs "people spend time as a diversion on my site and explore photos and status updates of friends", it might be important to care more.

100% agreement that evolving design to the desired spot is more educated -- I think that statement is indisputable, as it is essentially saying "if you can incrementally split test results with lots of different versions, you can learn more".

With a large "total redesign" you just get one fat multivariate test that can have conflicting results and you can't isolate the winning changes.

I was just stating that the time penalty for evolution might be too large for extremely small teams. its not just a design, its design, implentation, and testing the differences -- which takes a lot more time than just implementing the design itself. without testing results, incremental design is only good for "easing the user in" and you lose all the benefits of the "more educated approach" you're referring to (which, in my mind is the valuable part... users are forgiving, you can shock UI from time to time, but information gained can be priceless)

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