What does getting it right the first time cost us?

“Get it right the first time” sounds like an instruction about quality. Be prepared. Think carefully. Respect the people who will have to live with your work.

It also makes the first attempt a peculiar place to put all of our confidence. That is the attempt we make with the least information about what will happen once the thing leaves our hands.

We have learned to work around this. There can be dozens of versions before the first version. We circulate them, disagree over them, send them up the decision-making tree, and revise them until they are ready to be introduced as though they arrived together. The public sees the finished object. Everything that made it possible has been tidied out of view.

Then, if we change something after the introduction, the change can become a question about whether we knew what we were doing.

I am interested in that boundary. What happens to our work when learning is allowed, but being seen learning is a credibility problem?

Very persuasive at the center of a slide

If you have been following Groundtruth 911, you may have seen its logo change several times. Design makes this method especially visible. A color moves. A shape changes. Something that looked settled yesterday has another version today.

From this side of the screen, I am using what I made and finding out more about it.

A logo seems like the sort of thing a person should have resolved before opening the doors. There is an entire process available for doing that. Develop the concepts. Circulate the options. Gather internal feedback. Revise. Escalate. Eventually, the logo graduates from a presentation into the small corner of a website where it will spend most of its actual life.

And perhaps, after all that, it looks terrible there.

It was very persuasive at the center of a slide.

Everyone involved can be thoughtful, competent, and acting in good faith. A decision can still survive an impressive amount of review before it encounters the conditions it was supposed to work in. The people authorized to approve it and the people who will use it may be answering very different questions.

Prototyping helps. It cannot give me every kind of information I need. Sometimes I have to press play and encounter the thing as part of an ordinary day. I need to see what people understand, where they hesitate, and what I find myself wanting to explain. I also need to discover how I respond to it once I am living with it. I am part of the feedback loop, too.

Something can look right while I am making it and feel wrong once it becomes the front door to my work. Using it changes what I know about it.

I could spend three months arriving at my most perfect logo. I would still have arrived at my most perfect logo. The time would buy me a more thoroughly considered preference, with no guarantee that anyone else would share it.

Perfection does not become universal because we worked very hard on it.

The risk with a meeting invitation

When I examine what feels risky about revising a logo or a page in public, I usually arrive somewhere fairly ordinary. Someone might judge me. Someone might dislike the work, prefer an earlier version, or see a mistake before I correct it. They might decide I should have figured this out privately.

I might look a little foolish.

Those possibilities can be uncomfortable without being a sufficient reason to hold the work back. A misunderstanding can reveal an assumption in my explanation. A preference can tell me something about how a person encounters the work. Even my own discomfort becomes more useful when I can identify what, specifically, is bothering me.

These are things I can examine. While the work stays private, I am largely examining my predictions of them.

Embarrassment has a remarkable ability to borrow the language of responsibility. “I don't want anyone to see me get this wrong” can become “We need another round of review” without much difficulty. Give it a meeting invitation and it starts to look like governance.

Sometimes another review is exactly what the work needs. I want to be able to name what it is protecting. A person's safety? Their information? A commitment they are relying on? Or my appearance of already having every answer?

The distinction matters because the cost of waiting also belongs in the decision. Time spent anticipating a response is time in which I could have something concrete to learn from. The opinions will arrive after three days or three months. By the third month, I may simply be more attached to the decision they ask me to reconsider.

That is an expensive way to become harder to persuade.

The truck is not coming

Some of our standard operating procedures still seem to imagine that publication sends a truck to the loading dock. The ink has dried. Ten thousand copies are on their way. Whatever we missed is now expensive to retrieve.

That is a reasonable situation to prepare carefully for. I am less convinced that every decision about an editable website needs to inherit the same ceremony.

I can change a color palette in minutes. The technical cost of that revision is small, while the expectation that I should have needed no revision can remain remarkably intact. We have editable tools and a professional imagination that still pictures wet cement.

This is part of the question I keep returning to when I write about reinventing the wheel: which parts of a process are doing useful work, and which parts are carrying assumptions from the conditions that produced it?

Digital work has consequences, too. An editable sentence can still mislead someone before it is corrected. A changed route can break something a person depends on. The existence of an undo button tells me very little about whether another person can undo the effect on their day.

So the useful question is specific: what would this particular change cost, who would carry that cost, and what could I learn by making it? A logo and a tool used in public safety deserve very different answers. Calling both of them “a release” should not flatten that distinction.

I want the amount of ceremony to have some relationship to what is actually at stake.

People still need to find the door

I have also written about the burden of constant innovation on people who are simply trying to do their jobs. If I move the front door every morning, I have created a problem for everyone trying to visit. My freedom to revise does not make their attention free.

Consistency is useful when it helps people recognize the work, find their way, and rely on what I say something does. Those are responsibilities I want to preserve. They give me a reason to be deliberate about changes, including a reason to make a change when the existing version is confusing people.

Leaving something alone can be a good decision. So can changing it. Neither tells us much without knowing what the people using it need.

That is where building in public has helped my practice grow faster. I can move between making, using, listening, and adjusting without treating every trip as a formal occasion. A page gives an idea somewhere to live outside my head. A question can show me which part needs a clearer explanation. Living with a decision can reveal a problem I could not see while trying to perfect it.

Design happens to make those trips visible. The same method helps me understand what I am building, what belongs together, and where to put my attention next. I get further into the work because I spend less time trying to predict all the information the work itself could give me.

I still have to exercise judgment. An opinion is information, and I have to decide what it means, whose experience it represents, and whether acting on it would make the work more useful. That can include keeping a decision after considering a criticism.

What I value is having something real to consider, and allowing people to see how I arrive somewhere. A visible revision can show that a question reached me and that I was willing to do something with it. I would like that to count toward credibility.

“Get it right the first time” leaves very little room for that kind of evidence. It asks the introduction to bear the weight of everything we have yet to learn.

I would like to get it right. I would also like the people who encounter the work to have a say in what right turns out to mean.