The concept is simple enough: Take the time to do something right the first time and you will inevitably complete the task faster and better than if you rushed to “just get it done”.
When you rush something, you are bound to make mistakes that need to be corrected, which can take more time than if you just took the time to do it right the first time. This is a philosophy that we’ve been preaching for many years and it seems there is no end to the number of ways it can be applied to your everyday professional and personal life.
At UX Team, we are always expressing to our customers the importance of prototyping a software solution BEFORE we start coding anything. Building software can get rather expensive but if you invest in the time upfront to design and prototype a product, you will avoid spending hundreds of hours re-architecting and re-coding the software once it has been deployed. In addition, we also see companies rushing to get their project into development before they even know if they have a viable product. Why not get a prototype in front of users to test and validate the business idea before building it?
Prototyping not only helps get everyone on the same page with the product’s requirements and how users will interact with the product, they also remove a lot of the guess work for the developers. A good, comprehensive prototype will provide screen designs for most or all of the key screens of an application so that the developer can concentrate more on coding and less on design. By “design”, I don’t just mean the elements of the interface, I mean the flow, the form validations and error messages, whether a screen refreshes or updates using AJAX, the CSS that should be used throughout the interface, etc… The more complete your prototype, the more likely the app will be developed right the first time.
Every task has a beginning and an end – and if you truly examine the full duration it takes to complete a given task, more often than not, the task that was rushed will actually take longer and have a much worse end-result than the one that was done right. So, “go slow to go fast” and spend a little time now to save a lot of time later.
