ARTICLE SUMMARY: A lot of designers use the analogy of “building a house” for building their digital projects.
Essentially to build a house, first you need a blueprint (strategy), and then you pour the foundation (platform), build the walls (wireframes), install the plumbing and electrical (APIs), put in the fixtures and flooring (content) and finally decorate (visual design) and move-in (launch).
It may be an over simplification, but it works.
“Delivering at the Speed of the Customer” by Brian Flanagan gives you a few suggestions to follow when starting your digital projects. He suggests that you
- Think Big. Start Small. Move Fast
- Create a Shared Vision
- Include the User
The nice thing about building digital projects is you can make changes on the fly in real time while house construction changes take time and cost an arm and a leg and darn near impossible once building has started.
In the digital world, we’re not building houses, we’re developing technology-based experiences. We are not limited to the constraints of the physical world, so why would we follow the same methodology?
Brian Flanagan concludes the article by telling us “we can move away from traditional working models that are rooted in the physical world and that the digital world enables us to create and recreate at an accelerated pace.” We just need to think a little differently.
This is a very interesting article, let us know what you think in the comments.
