Get over your idea.
You might think creative people are the main reason for the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest (I certainly think so). The amount of paper we use to sketch, write, draw is sometimes insane and apparently utterly useless.
I have two reasons to put my idea on paper: first, I have a short-term memory, sometimes it lasts even less than those 9 seconds goldfish have at their disposal. But as every single cloud has a silver lining, I’m a great secret keeper mainly because I forget them even before you say “keep it for yourself”.
Second reason - and this is insightful so stay with me- is the following: the moment you put your idea on paper it doesn’t belong to you anymore, it’s just an idea on a paper. Back in Miami Ad School, I had the most intimidating and frustrating teacher ever (hey Flo, whatuuup?), but he used to say: “don’t get too attached to your idea, because the moment somebody sees a fail in it, you’ll try to save it with all your might and that’s not your job. You job is to make the idea work.” And it’s the same for UX designers. When you create something so great that makes you feel like “Elon Musk please step aside”, always step back and test it out on your users. Because as Ironhack Lead UX Design Teacher (yo Muri!) points out every time he’s not too busy styling his bed head
“you’re not your user, and what you might love, somebody might hate.”
Yeah I write it as a quote because he’s always crazily insightful and this concept is so important we tend to forget.
This is what happened yesterday. Me and my team created a really cool feature to implement a grocery shopping e-commerce, but when we tested out we found people got confused because this feature was available too late in the process and they couldn’t access it before a certain amount of steps, which made the user face fill out with question marks. So when I desperately tried to save the feature in a roundabout manner, my teammate said “dude, stop. You have to mind the user first, you’re not designing for yourself!” I have to admit I got emotionally attached to my idea because it’s also something that relates to my personal situation, that’s why it was hard to let it go. And I closed myself into a silent bubble of self-reprimand, which damaged the team harmony and our team work.
That’s why we put ideas on paper, to be more detached and unbiased about it. Because the moment you let it out, suddenly that idea is not yours that much anymore. And fighting for yours it is legit, but before you draw your sword take a minute to look at it and consider if your user can somehow take advantage of it, or it’s just a great idea for the sake of being cool.
As for our environmental “little” problem, I’ll write a suggestion to Ironhack in order to use recycled paper, because no matter what Trump might say this Berlin hot weather lasted way too long and I’m seriously concerned about global warming. Peace out.
