Tiny Fiefdoms, Fad Diets, and Making Good Stuff
Posted December 9, 2011 @ 11:35 am
The Web’s full of tiny fiefdoms. Web standards, content strategy, information architecture, user experience design, responsive design, usability, user research, test-driven development, behavior-driven development, mobile-first development, interaction design, agile, extreme programming.
They’re easy to identify. Look for a buzz-wordy label that encapsulates a small portion of what’s involved in building software (for the Web or otherwise). Find the purveyor of that label. Look at his or her inner circle; they’ll likely be espousing the same strategy and frequently congratulating each other on ever-so-minor successes. You’ll see them speaking at the same conferences, often presenting the same undifferentiated talks every time. Observe how many people follow this group on Twitter and how many of them subscribe to the methodologies of the purveyor. Congratulations; you’ve found a fiefdom.
Not all of them are bad. Luke Wroblewski’s mobile-first approach is smart. Having seen him talk, I can tell you that he’s a bright guy with some great ideas. But best of all: Luke doesn’t sit on his hands. He’s constantly absorbing new data, refining his thoughts on the subject, and trying to help people make their way in the strange, claustrophobic new world of mobile development. And he does a lot of this for free through his blog, which—to my mind—shows that he cares immensely about the message.
Luke’s an aberration, though. Most fiefdoms are like fad diets. They’re flash-in-the-pan ideas that work for some people. But fad diets work because—possibly for the first time—the practitioner is paying attention to what he or she eats. It’s not magic; it’s attention and care.
The best thing that can happen to a fad dieter is that he or she walks away from the experience with a better appreciation for nutrition. Similarly, the best thing that can happen to a follower of one of these software development methodologies or business practices is that he or she walks away with a better understanding of the common sense principles involved in making a solid product.
Sadly, some fad diets have no science behind them, no substance, which means you can’t learn anything. Likewise, some tiny Web fiefdoms are led by charlatans, many of whom are very lazy.
But here’s the thing: you don’t need fad diets, and you don’t need buzz words or a fancy label or marketing spin or the promise of easy or whole conferences devoted to something something writing microcopy blah blah to understand what’s necessary to make a good product. You don’t need a champion. You don’t need a team of experts.
At least one company seems to be getting this right. I watched a presentation earlier this week by Zach Holman about how the people at GitHub—developers, designers, everyone—build their product. It couldn’t be simpler.
They don’t use some technique that has a service mark attached to it. They focus on the details, and they care a lot about what they’re building. Period. And they ship a lot of code. Often. Probably more (and more frequently) than me, you, your company, your friend’s startup. And judging by what Zach said, a lot of this is because they trust each other to do their best work. GitHub is proof that trust, coupled with a lightweight branch-pull-deploy workflow, can lead to amazing, profitable software. But what struck me is that a lot of what they do is plain common sense, and their methods grew organically out of the culture of the company.
They didn’t need a consultant to tell them this. You don’t need a consultant, either.
The next time you hear someone prattling on about Behavior Driven Content Testing with Waterfall Methodologies for Agile, Responsive Design, do yourself a favor, step back, and evaluate what he or she is pitching. Here are some questions for your bullshit filter:
- Is it common sense repackaged with a service mark?
- Does this encapsulate only one tiny portion of my work?
- How new is this “idea?”
- What else has the purveyor of this idea done?
- Specifically: what has he/she done lately?
- How many conferences has this person attended where he/she presented the exact same presentation?
- Can I cherry-pick parts of this “idea” to improve how I already work and ignore the douchey parts?
Personally, I’m going the safer route by ditching all of this stuff. I’ve fallen for pitches in the past, for ideologies that sounded fantastic. I even went so far as to call myself a user experience designer for a while. Truth is, though, I’m just a developer who makes software. I make it with attention to detail, a helluva lot of thought about how users will interact with it, and immense care about the finished product. But I don’t need a fancy title to point that out. My work should do that. And I’d rather spend time making things that demonstrate what I’m capable of than palling around with a bunch of thought leaders on some social network.
Fuck buzz words. To hell with fiefdoms. Sweat every pixel; care about your users. Make something good.
