Listening to This Developer’s Life and enjoying it. The following quote from living legend Dan Bricklin (the co-creator of the first spreadsheet program Visicalc) is something I view as a truism. It’s a behaviour that just keeps recurring in working with customers or prospective customers:
Most people didn’t get it until they saw it in actual operation and only if it was useful for their problem… if they were shown it for their problem. I got… when I showed it to some people who did accounting they would get .. you know… they would start shaking and ….”It takes me hours and hours to do that and you just did it in 15 minutes”.
Dan Bricklin, photographed by Betsy Devine at a blogger brunch in Boston’s Chinatown 2/25/2007
You can describe something in detail and talk through how a piece of software would work and get nowhere with the person you’re talking to. However if there’s a small prototype showing automation of some functionality that a person cares about then wham! They get really excited at what is possible. They “get it” in an instant where no amount of whiteboarding or documents helped previously.
It’s a combination of the dynamics of using a piece of software or maybe also some disbelief in what can be done without seeing it work live. The problem is that we can’t develop prototypes continuously to communicate. It would be an unrealistic commercial approach. A solution to this is to develop software prototypes for a fixed price. It’s a great way of exploring practical software possibilities and allows all parties to get a strong indication of what is possible and how much can be done with a fixed amount of resources.