Reading along? Start at the beginning of Project Avocado or check out the previous post Show Me Already!
OK, so I made a point last post about not getting caught up on small details and get your product in front of customers as soon as possible to confirm the idea and get feedback.
But you made that in 3 hours? I hear you say? Yes and no. Let me start by showing you the things I don’t like about project avocado app at this point.
And that’s just the UI. Forget that the backup doesn’t work, settings is empty, etc. I sketched that in OneNote in about 2 minutes waiting for a doctors appointment so this is not what I would call an exhaustive list.
I’m being harsh with triage at this point. All these things need attention, and many will get it before release, but some of them may also become obsolete.
For example; the star in the command bar. I was planning top make the “Has Changes” flag animate and be pretty and was agonising over where should it be.. In the tab control at the top? Top right corner? What colour?
You know what happened when I looked at it? It’s completely superfluous. Along the way I set the save button to only be enabled if there were changes to save… so that little star now serves no purpose.
Also, I know I don’t like the save/save as/rename. I don’t want this to feel like a Windows 3.1 file system. Where have I seen that better?
BUT.
Behind the scenes, it would work the same (it is GOING to be saved, but the UI will change) so best to get the app stood up and the logic working and revisit the interface later. Getting those things working allows me to test all kinds of other parts of the app which are difficult at best without those basic features.
You can spend 90% of your time on the last 10% of work. This means you can build the basic subset in 10% of the time to start validating and iterating.
To wrap this all up, build your important low level features and don’t get too caught up on things you can polish later.