I’m sure either you have said or heard such a sentence. It’s well known that functionality is the key part of an application. You can’t do much with good-looking screenshots. Most of developers focus on having the functionality implemented as efficiently as possible. I do it, probably you do so as well.

It often happens that although there is a design ready for the application, we don’t implement it because there are still lots of functional issues pending. Well – we can’t be blamed for this. In majority of cases the functionality that has to be implemented requires much more work than the look & feel. It’s obvious that we want the difficult parts to be solved at first.

It’s all true, but what do you know about what the client thinks? When doing projects in PGS, most of clients followed the standard path: functionality first, design later on. Recently, I have decided to do a experiment: we implemented as much of the design as possible before all the functionality was ready. The product was still in the bug-fixing phase, so it was not working correctly in all cases, occasionally it crashed (I guess you know what I mean), but the application had 90% of the design applied.

During the next partial delivery, it came out that the client became much more optimistic about the project when he saw it “looking nice”. I guess that the 20/80 rule ( 10/90 or whatever you like) applies here as well. It takes only 20% of time to implement the design, but it gives as much as 80% of the positive feedback from the client. Even when you application throws an error – a standard error page or window will cause the client to think

“It’s not working at all!”

while a nicely styled one, with some user-friendly message will result in

“Uh-oh, an error, I must have done something wrong”.

So next time, when you are working on a project – try to leverage the workload so that you can get more look & feel ahead. I’m sure your client will appreciate this and so will you.

Related posts

1. What we are here for?
2. Introduction to xVal
3. Estimation of software development projects