Just mow the grass

Alice Toth, Thursday, May 14, 2009 @ 5:32 am

photo credit: great_sea

Gauging a client’s wants and needs is as much an art as it is a science. Oh sure, establishing the requirements and needed features and potential limitations (hello legacy system) is pretty much a straightforward scenario. It’s when we get into the layout and behavior of the application that negotiating the waters can begin to get a little tricky. Bump it to the redesign of an existing application that users are accustomed to, and the trickiness factor is raised exponentially.

I’ve been lucky with Pathfinder in that my last couple of projects have been to design and develop new software. The clients come in with an idea for a better mousetrap and we build it. They’re excited, we’re excited and we get to build something shiny and new that gives the client a good experience and helps build their business. A win-win in my book.

Not all projects have such a glorious life. In a previous job, I was part of a team that was tasked with porting a legacy system over to a new framework. Naturally, there were the usual levels of complexity all projects of this type always seem to encounter. However, the most difficult obstacle to overcome was the inability of the decision maker to see anything beyond the existing user interface.

Initially we were excited about the project. After all, we had the opportunity to create a better experience for the user, not only through reconfiguration of the workflow but also in applying nifty behaviors to widgets that would save the user time and create something more in line with how they actually worked. And each time, we continually ran into the same refrain when talking to the stakeholder: but it looks different and the old way works fine. Actually, it didn’t work fine but they were accustomed to using the existing application and weren’t open to hearing otherwise. After a month of this, team motivation dropped like a rock. Three years and however many dollars later, the product launched but wasn’t usable and everyone hated it. Epic fail.

So what to do when the client (internal or otherwise) keeps muttering “just mow the grass”* even when you’re charged with overhauling the entire landscape. While coherently explaining your concepts and views is a good start, providing tangible examples of a similar implementation of your ideas is much more successful. After all, only having a verbal description of how something works is akin to shadows on a cave — very open to interpretation. Ah, but give them something they can see and touch and interact with and now you’re all at the same starting point to begin discussing the possibilities.

If no real-world examples are available, create a quick prototype to explain your idea and show how it will behave. A prototype can be anything from a series of sketched wireframes to a hi-fi page mockup in Photoshop to an HTML page stubbed out in order to show interaction. What you use depends on the situation, audience and time. Something that needs to be presented to the money people may require a bit more polish. Something that can be presented to your key supporter could be as simple as a whiteboard sketch.

The important element is that the prototype explains your idea in such a way that your audience can quickly grasp your essential ideas and comprehend how your “radical” change will actually work within their product and still support their goals. And they, in turn, can tell two people and so on and so on ….

Overcoming the myopic view of “more mowing, less landscaping” takes a bit of effort and persistence and additional work on your part. And, as we can all certainly testify, there are some folks who either can’t or won’t be open to new ideas. However, using visual examples to support and explain your ideas goes a long way towards building a consensus for trying something new. After a couple of these sessions and wins, the client’s comfort factor is increased while initial resistance is decreased, and the overall effort needed to move towards the new is greatly reduced.

* I wish I could take credit for that phrase, which perfectly describes the situation, but this gem is courtesy of John McCaffrey

Related posts:

1. Thinking about starting a SaaS or eCommerce business?
2. What should our software do?
3. Visual Heuristics
4. Mowing the grass, Revisited
5. Definition of a Feature (Given … When … Then)

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1. [...] always in a place to be heard when it comes to discussing the fundamentals of a project.  Alice wrote a nice post about what ‘Just Mow the Grass’ meant to her, and the strategy she’s devised to find a nice middle [...]

   Pingback by Agile Ajax » Mowing the grass, Revisited » Pathfinder Development, Wednesday, June 24, 2009 @ 12:18 am

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