At the end of January this year I broke our boiler. By turning on the timer. It was old and would have broken anyway but it came at a really bad time. It was cold in the UK and we had just moved into our flat and were starting making plans for changing the layout of it.
We were also in the process of submitting a planning application for a loft conversion. We got a quote for a new boiler but the cost wasn’t cheap and with all the unknowns of how we were going to change the flat we decided to stick it out for the winter. It still produced hot water but had stopped providing us with central heating so we went and bought a portable radiator and started having fires more or less every night. It was cozy but oh dear it was cold.
Yesterday we got our new boiler installed. 10 months after the old one broke and just in time for the next cold snap. There is still a big unknown with our flat but we couldn’t wait to get the heating fixed. Though nothing visible flat wise has happened since the end of January a lot has happened. We got planning permission for our loft conversion and we now know that we will have a shower room up there. Something we hadn’t included in our first planning application. We know we will be putting in underfloor heating in the whole of flat and we are exploring buying the downstairs flat so we eventually can turn the two flats back into a house.
The boiler we have installed is powerful enough to handle all of the above, but had we bought it in January it wouldn’t have been as we would have gone for a cheaper and less powerful one. That would have been all we needed back then. If we don’t buy downstairs we’ll be sat with a boiler that is more powerful than we need, but considering it wasn’t that much more expensive we don’t mind. At least now we are future proof. And by waiting a “few” months we learnt what we want from our flat and avoided buying a boiler which we would have had to change as soon as the loftconversion and underfloor heating was done.
The point of this story is that in web-development just as with any big house purchase decision you can’t and shouldn’t wait until you have all things figured out to the tiniest of detail, or you’ll never launch (or buy) anything. However, with a bit of extra planning upfront you can ensure that you future proof your website/app/system so that it still works for what you need it to do six months down the line and that it can be updated without having to be completely rebuilt. This is why information architecture and experience planning are so important as it ensures just that.
What we do is:
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So the next time when you’re tempted to cut that 1-2 days of extra experience planning and IA time to keep the budget down, don’t. It’ll cost you more in the long run.
