Betting on Design

I’ve designed and created software and web sites for a lot of different companies over the years. All of those companies have been focused on features or just getting something out the door. They were more concerned about next week’s trade show than next year’s vision. They would rather have one paying customer today than one passionate customer tomorrow. I always understood their reasoning, but I never shared it.

After investing 100’s of hours in designing the future vision for Sifter, I’ve finally had the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is. Instead of chasing the all-powerful feature checklist, we’ve made a pretty big bet that improving the overall experience of using Sifter is a better decision than adding as many features as we can. That’s not to say that it’s right for every piece of software—only that we feel it’s right for us.

Spending such an incredible amount of time on design isn’t easy when the occasional customer cancels and tells you that they’re doing so because of your lack of features. However, staying true to this vision feels like the most important decision that I make every day. It’s frustrating at times because this is a massive exercise in delayed gratification. I just have to remember that we’re thinking about 5 years from now not 5 months from now.

Naturally, we’ve got a long journey ahead of us, and there won’t be a single moment where we unleash a 2.0. Instead, we’re going to finish laying out the vision and then steadily evolve towards it. To some degree we’ve already started the evolution. We’ll still be adding features as we go, but we’ll always put design and user experience first. We’re not going to add a feature simply to have it on our checklist. When we add something, there’s going to be a good reason for it, and we’ll be designing it carefully. That is, we spend about 3-5 times as much time thinking and designing than we do building. We don’t want to placate customers today—we want to give them a reason to love Sifter tomorrow.