Ploughing on is easy. You make progress. You produce things. You know the path. You continue, as you were. But it is darn dangerous.
Over the years of helping other companies with designing their customer experience and now with my own startup where time, team and other resources are limited, I’ve increasingly recommended taking a step back. To look at the bigger picture and then delve into the detail. To reassess and remind yourself of what you’ve set out to do. As a business and for your users. To look at analytics of what’s actually happening. To listen to your users about what they want. To dig into why something you’ve done hasn’t worked, or didn’t get the result you expected. Perhaps it was the wrong thing, or perhaps it simply wasn’t executed the right way.
There is no golden ticket to the right answer or the right solution. There are hypotheses, there are data, feedback, patterns and context and you need to understand all. It’s neither easy, nor quick, but it has to be done if you want to improve and succeed. And the first step for that is pulling your hear out of what you’re doing at the moment and look at the bigger picture.
Image via Flickr user Chris Piascik
