Closer To The Ideal

When I wrote “How much do websites cost” I made this comparison:

Imagine you hire a carpenter to build a deck on the back of your house. You tell the carpenter that you want the deck to be 10 by 20 feet, and to be built of oak. The carpenter goes out and buys the needed wood. Now you change your mind, and you tell the carpenter that you want the deck to be 8 feet by 18 feed, and to be built of mahogany. The carpenter has to charge you for all the oak that they bought. Changing your mind is expensive!

When it comes to home renovations, people have an easy time understanding why changes drive up costs. However, for some reason, when it comes to the web, people lack this understanding. It is true that the web is a fluid medium, but still, once work commences, the time invested needs to be paid for. If you hire a web design firm and tell them “I want a simple site that lists the services my company offers” then they will start to build one kind of website. If you change your mind and say “I really need a site where everyone in my company can document their work, so I can track what they are getting done” that is a completely different site and needs completely different code. The work on the first site would be thrown out (but you would need to pay for it) and work would begin on your second idea.

It is hard to get this across to clients, so I love this: If architects had to work like software developers.

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

[Update:]

One reason I prefer design lead development is that it reveals assumptions and makes things visually explicit. No one gets everything right the first time, therefore there needs to be a way to iterate through ideas, without great expense. The client and designer and developer need to avoid the illusion of agreement that comes from working with words. Thus, it is better to iterate with visuals. The mockups should be the source of agreement. You want to iterate through a lot of ideas fast, so you can fail fast, so that you can get to success fast. Iterative design processes help lower risk.

Changing your mind is expensive. Also inevitable. The goal has to be to keep costs as low as possible while experimenting with different ideas.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at 3:21 pm and is filed under cost, website development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.