Perfection vs. Functional: The Developer's Dilemma
Friday, June 29th, 2007When it comes to website development, there is a constant dilemma that goes on surrounding the question "How good is good enough?" Being as we work with such a pliable media, it's easy to get into the cycle of making things that work, and then build them up to meed demands and standards. However, at what point do we hit the point of diminishing returns?
For those unfamiliar with the law of diminishing returns, it is a economics concept that is used to determine price points for products and services. For every product or service, there is a maximal point of income where the quality of the product and the price a number of consumers are willing to pay are farthest apart.
For an example, you could sell a budget laptop for $500 at a profit of $50 per laptop, and lets say 1000 people are willing to buy it. That would give you a potential profit of $50,000. You could also sell a high-end laptop for $3,000 at a profit of $500 apiece, but then only 50 people are willing to buy it, giving you a profit of $25,000. However, in between you could sell a mid-range laptop for $1200 at a profit of $100 per laptop, with 800 people willing to buy it, giving you a profit of $80,000.
As you can see, as the quality of the product rises, the price consumers are willing to pay also rises. However, at the same time, the number of people willing to buy the product at the higher price typically decreases. Following these trends, there comes a point where producing an extremely high-quality product actually works against the seller, because the combination of profit margin and number of customers reduces total profit.
But yes, this is a post about websites and not about profit margins. As developers, we need to determine the point in which we've made a product good enough to justify the time and resources we put into it. If something requires a lot of our time, but doesn't benefit our work, should we still do it? What is the overall benefit to our end product? What is the cost if we do not do it? These are all questions we have to ask ourselves when we approach our work, since we don't want to subject ourselves to diminishing returns.
Over the last month, it's been interesting to see how people view thier websites, and the results we got were rather surprising to me. I honestly expected the majority of sites to recognize themselves as destinations, but instead it came out as a balance between hubs and basic information. 