Doing the Right Thing — And Getting it Right
Yesterday I was adding a feature to one page in my web app, and I wasn't happy with it at all. It was excessively crowded, and to me clearly looked like a forced fit. Yet, this is just what I was asked to do, and until I really completed it, I couldn't be 100% sure that it'd be such a horrible mess. But it was. Holy Cow! What a mess.
So this morning I decided that I was going to leave that page as-is and add the feature to the web app as a new page - specifically used to show historical data for some portfolios. I know it wasn't what my manager wanted, as he'd "talked" to me trying to understand what I was building. I told him to wait and see, and still he kept at me about trying to understand. I hope I made it clear that I wasn't interested in back-seat designers, but I'm guessing he didn't get the hint at all.
In any case, I decided that I was going to do this, and it didn't matter what he said. I was going to do it right, because I just knew there was a better way to visualize the data. So I didn't stop.
When I got done with the page - heck, I didn't need to get done with it, but just to the main visualization. It was clearly a vastly superior interface for this kind of data. Far cleaner, far clearer. Wonderful. I wish I had a screen capture of the two to compare, but it's not in the cards at this time. So it goes.
What impresses me most about this experience is that I did just what I wanted to do and came out on the other side with something that was vastly superior for the end user. I'm not going to be bullied into making a slap-dash product again.