I found that becoming an actual user of your own system changes the perspective entirely. I had this thing that I was making for myself, and it was not ready, not usable at all, or so I thought.
After giving up on the project I decided to try and actually started using it as if I was a user. I realised that as users, we are used to countless minor issues, and we automatically find ways around that. When you are the creator of something, you sometimes forget that a lot of sloppyness will not be a dealbreaker, and the user will effortlessly work around many of the shortcomings. Obtaining perfection is more about ego at that point.
So trying to actually use it, ignoring that you are the one who made it, and forbidding yourself to make any modifications for a while, can change everything!
I think this is why ship it and iterate fast is often the best path. There will be deal breaking bugs in any software project. If your accounting package doesn’t account correctly, you probably shouldn’t just ship it. But if one of the reports displays twice for some reason, users can probably deal with it until the next iteration as long as that next iteration isn’t months to years away. But the reality is you wont even find what most of the “bugs” your users will encounter until it’s out in the wild with real users. And unless you ship it, you’ll not get to work on the bugs your users are actually impacted by.
Interesting point. An app I just used had an embedded ios web browser that didn't work properly.
I opened the web page directly and used it like that. The username/password were iCloud-synced, of course. Took me all of 5 seconds to resume the user flow in Safari (which only took another 30 seconds to finish.)
I think it's something that I already knew in my heart, but I think by putting it like this you killed some shipping anxiety and perfectionism tendency in me. Thanks :)
After giving up on the project I decided to try and actually started using it as if I was a user. I realised that as users, we are used to countless minor issues, and we automatically find ways around that. When you are the creator of something, you sometimes forget that a lot of sloppyness will not be a dealbreaker, and the user will effortlessly work around many of the shortcomings. Obtaining perfection is more about ego at that point.
So trying to actually use it, ignoring that you are the one who made it, and forbidding yourself to make any modifications for a while, can change everything!