Photo by Dan McKay http://www.flickr.com/people/mukluk/

“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly- at first”

This is a quote from Dick Karpinski that, Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh computer, quotes in his book “The Humane Interface“.

Last week Dick emailed me to point out that on our home page instead of saying “These actionable metrics will allow you to increase customer conversion rates” I had said conversation rates. One or two other people had also written in with the correction.

The great benefit of this mistake has been it has led to some great conversations.

I have Dyslexia which means spelling is hard. Normally when I write anything it goes through the stages of spell checking, and then getting one or more people to proof read the content. I often procrastinate in putting anything to words because of the frustration of having to go through all these steps, and that my writing is not as good as the rest of my family of writers (my father, mother, great aunt, grandmother, and great great uncle).

But we needed to have our website up to show the worlds that we are here. So, it went up early, imperfect, with areas for improvement. I have left the mistake on the home page, and will apply the Dick’s changes in the new year in the hope that others start a conversation.

The benefit of this mistake has been that I have had the opportunity in getting feedback, that will lead to a far better web site then if had used my previous approach. As Dick Karpinski said to me that was the meaning of his quote, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly- at first”. The important thing is to confront reality early and often to get past the horrible statistic that half or more of (especially big) IT projects are abject failures.

Dick said that Jef Raskin never tried to settle a User Interface issue by using his authority. He always said, let’s test that. “Quick, cheap, small tests are what let Toyota implement a million suggestions a year. I cannot imagine any Detroit auto maker doing one percent as many.”

This is what we are trying to enable with Webnographer. The idea is a tool to enable developers and designers to confront reality early, and often.