Teams often spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to make their work shiny and impressive, rather than get the basics right and just make it work great for its purpose. It’s a pity.
I contemplated this, when last year I visited the Netherlands to attend a wedding in a rural castle. We booked a hotel in Roermond, a town we had never heard of before, but was the closest one to the wedding venue. It had nothing shiny, but delivered everything you would expect it to. Bravo!
First, it is a beautiful European town, pleasant to spend time there even just walking around. Then, there were enough good restaurants and cafés with reasonable prices and even beach bars (!) next to the river bank — quite unusual for Central Europe. Last, it has a train station connecting it with popular locations like Maastricht — you are not a prisoner in an all-inclusive amusement park, but on the contrary it encourages you to explore. All reasonable expectations were topped.
The same should be true for software too. Too many companies put too much effort and money on the wrong direction. For example, why create a marketing website with stunning graphics and animations, but not care about it being slow to load, with low accessibility or illegible text?
A website should be fast, accessible and legible. After taking care of these, you should spend time on search engine and social media friendly markup, so that it can be crawled, back-linked and shared. After taking care of the markup too, then it makes sense spending time on making it stunning to look at. There is no point in creating a gorgeous website, which is hard to be discovered by internet users and even then, it’s a pain in the ass to use.
Get the basics right first. Make it usable, then you can make it shiny.
