“You can't paint dirt”

My grandfather used to say, “You can't paint dirt.”

I thought of it this past weekend while re-painting our backyard chicken coop. That thing had a lot of dirt that needed to be cleaned up before we could paint it.

But grandpa meant something else, too.

I mean, you actually can sometimes paint dirt. But because the dirt isn’t fixed in place, your paint job won't last very long. However beautiful it may be in the moment, your work will amount to lost effort when the dirt beneath it shifts.

This came up again yesterday as I was helping my oldest daughter revise a research paper she's been working on. Trying to polish the language early on, before the major pieces of content are organized and put in place, can not only be wasted effort. It can actually prevent the writer from completing that important task synthesizing the research into a cohesive whole, by getting lost in the details of word choice and sentence length.

The same can be said for your custom-built features and configuration of event registrations, online membership signups, and the like.

Digging in too early on polishing the look and the language will usually result in a lot of wasted effort. What’s worse, it can be a major distraction from focusing on getting the functionality right in the first place. Make it as beautiful as you like, but if it doesn’t function properly, it will create more frustration than joy.

Here's the thing.

Creating new tools and features for your users is an iterative process.

Making it all beautiful is valuable work that will absolutely improve the experience of your users and their willingness to it.

But the more you can focus on building the right functionality first, the better positioned you'll be to have a fixed surface on which to build a beautiful presentation that lasts.

All the best,
A.