Matt West’s Blog

Category: Thoughts

  • In Defence of Giving a Damn

    The past few weeks I’ve been working on a project that just didn’t seem to turn out right. Despite three major design iterations and a thousand smaller explorations, I wasn’t happy with the result.

    Sometimes this happens. It would be oh so easy to draw a line under it and move on. There’s always more work to do. But it eats away at me. Like a master cabinetmaker who finishes the back of the drawer for nobody’s satisfaction but their own, I couldn’t help feeling I could have done a better job. I ended up spending the time to refine the design, because just fine, just isn’t fine.

    Does this make me a perfectionist? Probably.

    Does it reflect a level of care for the people who will use this product? Absolutely.

    In the rush to always be shipping it’s easy to let quality slide. It starts in the small details. Then all at once everything seems broken.

    Give a damn. It’s the best defence we have against mediocrity.

  • Owning the whole

    I stumbled across this documentary about Sebastian Cox and his mission to prove that sustainably sourced British woods can be used to create wonderful furniture.

    Against The Grain – Documentary Film About Furniture Maker Sebastian Cox

    Something that particularly resonated with me was how the craftspeople in his workshop are responsible for realising a product from start to finish. There’s no division of labour. Forcing people to develop their craft in a wide range of areas from preparing the wood and assembly, to final finish.

    Sebastian refers to this principle of having people owning the whole process, as being derived from William Morris’ view of how mass production diminished craft skills during the Industrial Revolution.

    It made me think about how fragmented a lot of product teams have become when building software. It’s rare to have a single persons that owns a whole feature. Things get divided up into design/engineering, frontend/backend, mobile/web. The division of labour is very present.

    There are many good reasons for these divisions of course. But it’s a reflection of how the software industry is very much in the mass production phase of development.

    I’ve often considered how the lack of ownership over the whole is reflected in the end quality of a feature or product. It’s possible to build great products this way, but I can’t help feeling that something is lost.

  • Keep it Simple

    Keep it Simple

    I’ve recently started using an app called TeuxDeux to help me plan my work for the week. It’s a brilliantly simple tool. The TeuxDeux website includes a /Purpose that outlines the team’s motivation for building the product and their vision for the future. 

    1. Simple enough to compete with a piece of paper.
    2. Beautiful enough that we wouldn’t mind (and might even enjoy) looking at it all day.

    The purpose of the app is perfectly captured in these two short sentences. 

    Build it simple. Build it beautiful.

    The team’s vision for the future is equally inspiring:

    If you like what you see with TeuxDeux (for example, its sparse, lovely design or intuitive personal timeline), you can take comfort in the fact that we will stay true to what it stands for today. Ten years from now”‰”””‰when we’ve finally domesticated koala bears and everyone can have one as a pet”‰”””‰TeuxDeux will still be chugging along, making your day-to-day just a little bit brighter.
    On that note, why the heck does every app need to change all the time? Can’t something on the Web be more or less finished?
    We think so.

    The thing I love most about this vision is that there’s no mention of big feature developments, third-party integrations, or building a ‘platform’. The team behind TeuxDeux recognise that they’ve built a product that solves the problem they set out to tackle. They’ve resisted the urge to tinker.

    It’s okay to call a product finished. You don’t have to be constantly changing things in order to grow your product.

    By all means maintain your products, but don’t build more features just to create the illusion of progress in an attempt to attract more users. Build something useful and your customer base will grow with time.

  • Thoughts on Progress

    We must be prepared to disagree more often. To challenge those philosophies which do not align with our modern views. To ensure we are not guided by dogma, and consider ideas in the context of our current beliefs and experiences.

    To make progress we must understand the past. We must learn from our failures and our successes, but we must define our own future.

    To blindly follow the thinking of those that came before is a decision to forego progress in pursuit of maintaining the ideals of the past.

  • The Permanence of Data

    I recently started keeping a journal again, it helps me to think through the things that are on my mind. I thought about purchasing a nice leather journal to write in. The idea of having something physical that would hopefully outlive me is interesting to me. It’s funny because data has the potential to be stored forever, whereas notebooks will eventually disintegrate; and yet notebooks still seem more permanent to me.

    As we go through life we amass all of this knowledge and experience that make up who we are. Before computers these things could only be written down in journals or captured in photographs and yet now all of these things exist in digital form. Stored away on some server somewhere. What happens to all this data when we’re gone?

    For my generation almost our whole lives have been catalogued in some sort of digital form. Maybe this is how we pass on the knowledge that we amass to others. Then again there’s so much data now that you have to pose the question as to whether it would even be useful.

  • Live every day as if it’s your first

    I just read this really awesome article on TechCrunch by James Altucher about how you can filter out negative thoughts so that you are more productive. The article is tailored towards entreprenuers with startups but I think that the ‘nine filters’ that James talks about are absolutely suited to life in general.

    “Live each day as if it is your first”

    One of my favourite bits of the article is the idea that you should live each day as if it is your first. When I read this I first thought about the Buddhist idea of having a beginner’s mind. The theory is that having a clear mind allows you to look at a situation with out any pre-conceptions and therefore produce an action that is truly your own. When you think about it this is pretty powerful.

    Being a web designer it’s easy to get bogged bown into the ‘standard’ layouts of a website and this can really put a downer on your creativity. If you asked someone to design a web page that had never seen one before I bet that it would look nothing like the sorts of web pages out there today. Having a mind free of any knowledge or pre-conceptions about a subject can help you to be really innovative, without even knowing it.

    Anyway you should check out the article it makes a really interesting read, you can find it here.