One flaw with human nature (alas, we can add this to the endless list) is that people judge everything by their appearance and one particularly severe case of this that clients and bosses judge work by the most superficial details. We’ve discussed this before in the context of avoiding typos, and your Zoom backgrounds. But another, much more important situation, with counter-intuitive consequences, is when you demo or show off something in-progress you’re working on.
Here’s the really common situation. You’re building a product and want to show it to the client or boss. There’s some minor design problem like a tiny little element is off—and the client gets fixated on that. Or a variation, you’re a developer and you show off the user experience front-end to your client and the front-end is near-perfect and as a result, he thinks the product is almost complete—not realizing you only did the 5% of the front-end, not the 95% of the engine that powers it. No client realizes that. Well, almost none.
This can’t be understated enough. So many clients have gotten really angry because, having seen an awesome demo of a product, They Think It Works. It’s hard for people to appreciate what they don’t see. They can’t see all the complexity that goes into the hidden back end you’re building.
But there’s a good way to minimize this problem. Qualifications don’t work—even if you say “the back end hasn’t been built yet, we’re only 5% done”—if they see a perfect front-end, they’ll think it’s 95% complete!
So, you can solve it by flipping it on its head: make demos obviously broken. Give the design a very prototype-y look and feel, not the real graphics. On the first click, have it go to a broken page—on purpose—and then declare, “Oh! Sorry! It’s really only 5% done, as I just said,” that moment is worth 11,000 words!
More broadly, don’t be afraid to make mistakes on purpose. Sometimes, you need to do something wrong to make a point clearly and strongly. Sometimes on the small level, but sometimes on a big level. Just do so with care and with purpose.
