I didn’t come up with that catchy little phrase above. I learned it from smart developers. And if you have worked with (or read books by) smart developers, all of this VDP stuff might sound a bit familiar.
Programming is complicated. It is usually a bad idea to write a whole bunch of perfect code before you test that code. Sort of like designing a huge, expensive new feature before you talk to users. It’s better to start small and test as you go.
Coders usually start with a “proof of concept” that is quick, ugly, and just enough to demonstrate that their bigger plan will, in fact, work. And at that stage, quick and ugly is great! When you know that it will work, you go back and do it right. You remove the ugly and do it properly, because now you actually understand what “properly” should look like. You fix problems. You make it stable. You handle edge cases. Well done! Then, after the code is working well in real life, you start thinking about how to make it fast and efficient at a larger scale, for millions of users.
That kind of thinking is almost a universal thing in good software development. It just makes sense. And in UX we should think in a similar way. However...
Computers don’t get tired; they always follow instructions and can make millions of decisions per second. Human users, not so much. Humans ...
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