A minute of your time is worth a thousand of ours

The other night, the founding team of unIQad was pulling (yet another!) all-nighter. We were planning the next sprint of our beta-release (due in mid-December) and were loudly debating some tough decisions on the user interface.

Maybe it was too much coffee. Maybe it was too many late nights in a row. Maybe it was that he momentarily lost sight of the big picture. But one of the guys suggested that we inserted another step in our ‘campaign setup’ process. His argument was that it would require a couple of weeks of work on his part to eliminate that step. Maybe I was suffering from the fact that it was late – but I blew up completely.

Everything – and I do mean everything – we’re trying to do at unIQad aims at making things quick, simple and easy for our customers.

To provide a bit of context: I believe that nearly all software companies make exceptionally poor decisions when faced with a choice:

1. doing something that’s difficult for themselves but would make life easier for the user
2. doing something that’s easier for themselves but would make life harder for the user

Because we all don’t have enough time or resources, we want to be efficient. We want to put out more features. We want to cram as much as possible into a sprint or a release. Which is good. But it ends up being the wrong things that we cram in. We end up making decisions that make it easy on ourselves but hard on our customers. Idiocy in my opinion. But I've seen a lot of it.

And the worst part is that we tend to hide behind cover-up-arguments. The most common one is that when placing an additional burden on the user (instead of really really solving it and making difficult decisions in the PM and engineering team), we say that it’s because we want to give the user ‘more flexibility’. That’s complete and utter bullshit. In 99 times out of a hundred, it’s because the PM and engineers are either lazy or stupid. Because they’re afraid to make a bold decision.

The truth is that users very rarely want flexibility. The truth is that there are only a small fraction of things in using a software that requires flexibility. Maybe 0.1%. The other 99.9% of the time, a user (a consumer or a business user, it’s essentially the same) wants simplicity and speed in consumption. They’ll live with reduced flexibility and love it, if it makes life a little bit easier and simpler. I’m not even going to mention Apple in this context, but the truth is that there aren’t a lot of other really good examples. The main reason being that it’s really hard to do.

So – back to my René Redzepi moment. Probably didn’t win me the “Boss of the Year” award, but it made a good occasion to re-iterate the most important thing about unIQad. What our architect was suggesting was that we let the user do a little more work to save ourselves a lot of work. And in my rant against his idiotic suggestion, I ended up screaming that “if it takes a hundred hours of your time to save one minute of a user’s time, it’s the easiest f#%&€… decision we’ve ever had to make”.

We spent a couple of more hours discussing and came up with a kick-ass solution. One that will take a long time to develop. But one that will save our customers' time.

And that’s it, really.

Having thought it through, it still rings true. I’d like to think that the people at unIQad are neither stupid nor lazy (in fact, they're pretty amazing!), so I’ll leave the poor choices that come from those characteristics to others.

Think about what you do at your company when you’re faced with a similar decision.