Consider Perfection… Not the fictional Nevada town in the under-rated Kevin Bacon B-movie “Tremors”, but the state of being perfect, of having achieved a position from which no improvement is possible. It’s something to strive for, a sought after ideal; the ultimate goal of any serious endeavour, right? Not necessarily! Because Perfect can be the enemy of the merely Good. And that’s Bad!
There is a trap in the pursuit of perfection – a pitfall for obsessives and procrastinators alike. And it’s this… In chasing perfect, there is a real risk that nothing is delivered at all. Iterations and versions will come and go – prototypes destroyed and dissected only to be re-assembled, tweaked and polished before the cycle begins again. The end result is… Nothing!
Most of the time, Good Enough trumps Perfect if it means the product can get out there and get used and abused. It’ll break, and users will complain about the bits that don’t meet expectations. Technology will move on. And then there will be another version of whatever it is; it’ll be better, but not Perfect – improved, but still Good Enough!
Take a cycling related example, such as the rather lovely Colnago C60 frame. For four years, this represented the pinnacle of Colnago’s frame building expertise; gorgeous to behold (esp in black), light, stiff, and responsive. But not perfect. If it had been perfect, we would never have seen the lighter, stiffer and still gorgeous C64! Will the C64 be last in Colnago’s Cnn line of frames? Is it perfect? I hope not!
And as with bike frames, so it is with this website. It’s good enough to go-live, but far from perfect! Bits of it will break. Some of it may not be immediately intuitive (some elements may prove to be downright frustrating to use). But this is only v1.0 and it will evolve, change and improve over time. Constructive feedback will help it along the way and I hope you’ll agree that, in this case, Good Enough is better than the long, long wait for Perfect!
