Process

Today Dave Senior and I had the amazing opportunity to talk to Bill Buxton, Principal researcher at Microsoft Research and give him a demo of the product we’re creating. It was refreshing to finally talk to someone who wasn’t interested in how we were going to make money, but how we could simply create a great experience.

All of Buxton’s ideas and feedback were incredibly useful and invaluable. I was most intrigued in Buxton’s interest in not the content we were creating but how and why that content was being created and representing the story leading up to its creation to frame its meaning and relevance.

His comments remind me of an essay a friend of mine once wrote about the importance of process that I have always dwelled on. For example imagine creating something as simple as a perfectly round circle. Depending on how you create that circle changes how people react to it. If you created it with photoshop you probably spent a few minutes and impressed no one. However if you drew the exact same circle with a pencil that you held in your teeth, while being held upside down, to demonstrate infinity, you will probably turn a few heads and create interest.

The thing that makes one perfect circle stand out more than the other is HOW and WHY it exists.