Chapter eight
Would I still recognize the idea at the other end?
An idea changes as more people work on it. A developer has to make it function. A designer has to make it understandable. A person helping to sell it has to explain why anyone should care. Those contributions can improve it.
They can also pull it in different directions. A promise that works in an advertisement may be broader than the product. A measurement can reward something that does not make the experience better. The maker needs a way to keep the original purpose visible.
It helped to distinguish the useful idea from the way we happened to be presenting it. A page, category, or campaign might need to change without changing the product’s purpose. If the explanation stopped sounding like the situation that caused me to build the app, I needed to notice. The person’s problem was a better point of reference than the presentation around it.
For me, that purpose was still the person trying to get something done. I wanted each decision to make their next step clearer, even when a more impressive-sounding idea was available.
The idea spreads
I needed one question everyone could answer.
The more complicated the surrounding work became, the more useful a simple question was: what does this do for the person using the app? It could bring a conversation about features, copy, or installation back to the same place.
That question did not settle everything automatically. People could still disagree about the best answer. But it gave us something concrete to examine. We could look at the screen, the instructions, or the result and judge whether they helped.
Imagine two descriptions of the same feature. One sounds impressive but leaves a person unsure what they would do with it. The other explains the job in words they already use. Choosing the second can feel less grand from inside a business. From the customer’s side, it may be the first time the value becomes clear enough to act on.
It also gave me permission to leave some things out. An idea did not have to be bad to be unnecessary for the product in front of us. That was a relief after so much work had seemed to demand another addition.