How design is like writing is like ceramics

I.

You know the old story about the ceramics teacher?

One semester, the teacher assigned half his class to focus on the quantity of their output, and half on the quality. Those in the first group would be measured on the sheer number of pots produced. Those in the second would be assessed by the quality of one perfect pot.

Which group do you think got the better grade?

As it turned out, those in the quantity group produced pots with the highest quality. The theory is this: playing around, putting in time, and learning leads to quality.

II.

If you’ve read at all about the writing process, this probably sounds familiar. There’s many an aphorism on the topic, e.g. —

“The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.” Anna Enright

As you might imagine, we’ve spent some time thinking about this at Medium: what leads people to write (or not). We’ve investigated it from various angles — behavioral data, 1:1 interviews, surveys. And we knew, both from research and aphorisms, that one big reported reason was simply not “making time” for writing.

Now, “time” is rarely the real reason for not doing something — it’s really an interaction of a number of factors. As one writer put it, the reason she never actually got to writing was,

“Inertia; resistance; a lack of time. I am, after all, a new mom with a 25 hour a week job and a ton of excuses.”

Another said,

“I never really have time to write. And then when I do, I forget to write.”

Similar to other human endeavors like eating healthier, exercising more, and stopping using the internet at a reasonable hour, the distance between intention and action is vast.

And similar to making perfect pots, the first and most important step in making progress in writing seems to be taking one step at a time, and trying things.

III.

Recently, a similar point manifested in the design process.

A little bit after some of the initial research, Marcin Wichary, designer/writer extraordinaire and I had a little brainstorm with this in mind. At one point, we started by talking about how the qualitative research showed that people would often have explicit goals — “write every week!” — but there wasn’t always follow up.

How could we build this intention directly into the product? Immediately, and with great gusto, our minds went to a multi-prong approach: what if we asked for people’s writing goals (and hopes and dreams), and then continually checked in with them? What if we lauded them for every character count victory? Perhaps we could even suggest a draft they’d started and made most progress on as the one to wrap up?

We got excited about the possibilities at first, but then grew gloomy. This was a relatively substantial project and we didn’t have time for it, at least not imminently.

Then we thought: okay, okay, fine idea, but, meanwhile, what’s a little thing we could do now? What’s a lightweight way we could encourage writing, especially for those that have written before?

We started coming up with a number of ideas, and honed in on the Stats page in particular. What if writers could see which months they wrote more in? And whether they’re keeping up this month?

This could create a subtle nudge to get people to write more. “I did this before! I can do it again.”

A huge bonus: it wasn’t annoying. It wasn’t yet another email telling the user, hey you didn’t exercise! You didn’t eat enough vegetables! Your moral compass has stayed at a steady but disappointing “moderately moral” for the past month! It was more about showing, than telling.

Marcin got to implementing it, and it was live before we knew it.

Naturally, this is a teeny, tiny thing. But over time, it can have an effect, especially in conjunction with other bits. Internally, one writer said,

“I like this. I’ve been trying to write every Sunday but lately it’s gotten hard. With my current cadence (once-ish per week), it might get me out of the I-have-to-write-on-Sunday mentality and encourage me to write other days as well.”

Another said,

“When I saw this change to the stats page yesterday, I counted back and realized I was hella productive in July and August, and it made me feel WAY better about myself. Small things can make a big difference!”

Of course, getting excited is only half the battle. And it’s important to think holistically about what we design. But it feels good to have one pot down, tiny and imperfect as it may be.