Make a Meal, Not a Shopping List

Written by David Charney
Posted: March 24, 2009 (11 months, 3 weeks ago) | 0 comments

When starting a project, it is easy for us to gather up a shopping list of goals, wants, needs, and ideas. We may say “I want a chat room, a calendar, a blog, a forum, a product configurator and…” - you get the idea. In fact this list is great and all part of the discovery and defining process. The more information and ideas we can pull out of our heads, the better. But this is shopping list. It is a list of ingredients that don’t necessarily relate to each other. We buy ingredients to create a meal. There are a lot of ingredients we like but we must understand the that not all good ingredients can be put together to create a great meal. We choose ingredients that have their own unique flavors, textures, and colors, that intermingle to form the perfect tasting meal. This same idea can be applied within training, educational, and marketing applications. It is important that we not only define and develop the individual components, but how these components work together to form a comprehensive, cohesive experience.

When we create a meal we tend to pay a little more attention to how it tastes. We make adjustments to the ingredient until the next meal is even better. Metrics, or measurements do the same for your applications. We don’t make a meal and then throw it out. We don’t give it to someone and not ask how it was. The process continues past the development of your application. Use it yourself, find out what others think, and review the analytics.

If we focus both bottom-up and top-down, and explore ideas that are detailed while stepping back to review the big picture, there will be no stopping our pursuit in creating more engaging, better measurable, and more delicious applications.