Go ahead, ship it.

Don’t be afraid. You can always make it better. This is what product designers, and product design teams should be thinking when designing experiences.

Many companies/teams try to nail it the first time around, even the folks that say their process is iterative. They nit-pick ideas, second-guess decisions, and force changes just to ship something that they never end up revisiting. They put no plan in place to go back to what they’ve just designed and make it better. This is not how you design great experiences.

Here’s a little secret:

No matter how great of a product designer you are, you won’t have all the answers.

There are certain cases that you won’t/can’t think of, and problems you won’t/can’t identify, until people start using your product in the real world.

This is not to say that you should ship something that is half-assed, and not try to design the best possible experience that you can on the first release. Go with your insticts, and what you think feels right. Try it out. Test. If you find out that it doesn’t work, so what. You’ll fix it and make it better for the next release. And best of all, you’ve learned something about how people interact with your product. There are benefits to being wrong. Don’t be afraid to fail.

Work in an iterative process, so that you can learn from your failures, and improve upon them using real data. At MakeSpace, we follow a simple iterative design process after the initial release:

Ship. Analyze. Iterate. Test

Ship
Get your designs to a state that you feel comfortable with, and get it into the hands of your users. Test out your ideas. Do a gut check. There is nothing wrong with being wrong.

Analyze
Look at the data. Get feedback from your users and learn about their behaviors. Ask questions. The answers will help inform product and design decisions. This isn’t the final word. Instead, use what you’ve learned as a guide.

Iterate
This is the most exciting part, at least for me. You now know more about the people using your product. This is where you get to make things better. You take all that data, all that feedback, parse it, and move the experience forward.

Test
Validate your ideas. Test as early and as often as possible. Not just user testing, but test them internally with a prototype. And when I say prototype, I mean something that is actually functional, not a series of static screens linked together. If testing validates your ideas, then push that ship button. If you find issues, then keep interating.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Failing can be good. You’ll learn from it. You just don’t know all the answers, and that’s the beauty of it. Not knowing will foster exploration, and in the end, a better experience.