{"rowid": 66, "title": "Solve the Hard Problems", "contents": "So, here we find ourselves on the cusp of 2016. We\u2019ve had a good year \u2013 the web is still alive, no one has switched it off yet. Clients still have websites, teenagers still have phone apps, and there continue to be plenty of online brands to meaningfully engage with each day. Good job team, high fives all round.\nAs it\u2019s the time to make resolutions, I wanted to share three small ideas to take into the new year.\nGet good at what you do\n\u201cHow do you get to Carnegie Hall?\u201d the old joke goes. \u201cPractise, practise, practise.\u201d \nWe work in an industry where there is an awful lot to learn. There\u2019s a lot to learn to get started and then once you do, there\u2019s a lot more to learn to keep your skills current. Just when you think you\u2019ve mastered something, it changes.\nThis is true of many industries, of course, but the sheer pace of change for us makes learning not an annual activity, but daily. Learning takes time, and while I\u2019m not convinced that every skill takes the fabled ten thousand hours to master, there is certainly no escaping that to remain current we must reinvest time in keeping our skills up to date.\nPicking where to spend your time\nOne of the hardest aspects of this thing of ours is just choosing what to learn. If you, like me, invested any time in learning the Less CSS preprocessor over the last few years, you\u2019ll probably now be spending your time relearning Sass instead. If you spent time learning Grunt, chances are you\u2019ll now be thinking about whether you should switch to Gulp. It\u2019s not just that there are new types of tools, there are new tools and frameworks to do the things you\u2019re already doing, but, well, differently.\nDeciding what to learn is hard and the costs of backing the wrong horse can seriously mount up; so much so that by the time you\u2019ve learned and then relearned the tools everyone says you need for your job, there\u2019s rarely enough time to spend really getting to know how best to use them.\n\u00a0Practise, practise, practise\nDo you know how you don\u2019t get to Carnegie Hall? By learning a new instrument each week. It takes time and experience to really learn something well. That goes for a new JavaScript framework as much as a violin. If you flit from one shiny new thing to another, you\u2019re destined to produce amateurish work forever.\nLearn the new thing, but then stick with it long enough to get really good at it \u2013 even if Twitter trolls try to convince you it\u2019s not cool. What\u2019s really not cool is living as a forevernoob. \nIf you\u2019re still not sure what to learn, go back to basics. Considering a new CSS or JavaScript framework? Invest that time in learning the underlying CSS or JavaScript really well instead. Those skills will stand the test of time.\nAudience and purpose\nBack when I was in school, my English teacher (a nice Welsh lady, who I appreciate more now than I did back then) used to love to remind us that every piece of writing should have an audience and a purpose. So much so that audience and purpose almost became her catch phrase. For every essay, article or letter, we were reminded to consider who we were writing it for and what we were trying to achieve. \nIt\u2019s something I think about a lot; certainly when writing, but also in almost every other creative endeavour. Asking who is this for and what am I trying to achieve applies equally to designing a logo or website, through to composing music or writing software.\nBeing productive\nIt seems like everyone wants to have a product these days. As someone who used to do client services work and now has a product company, I often talk with people who are interested in taking something they\u2019ve built in-house and turning it into a product. You know the sort of thing: a design agency with its own CMS or project management web app; the very logical thought process of: if this helps our business, maybe others will find it valuable too; the question that inevitably follows: could we turn this into a product?\nWhether consciously or not, the audience and purpose influence nearly every aspect of your creative process. Once written or designed or developed or created, revising a work to change the audience and purpose can be quite a challenge. No matter how much you want to turn the tension-building, atmospheric music for a horror film into a catchy chart hit, it\u2019s going to be a struggle. Yes, it\u2019s music, but that\u2019s neither the audience nor purpose for which it was created.\nThe same is absolutely true for your in-house tools \u2013 those were also designed for a specific audience and purpose. Your in-house CMS would have been designed with an audience of your own development team, who are busy implementing sites for clients. The purpose is to make that team more productive overall, taking into account considerations of maintaining multiple sites on a common codebase, training clients, a more mature and stable platform and all the other benefits of reusing the same code for each project. The audience is your team and the purpose increased productivity.\nThat\u2019s very different from a customer who wants to buy a polished system to use off-the-shelf. If their needs perfectly aligned with yours then they wouldn\u2019t be in the market for your product \u2013 they would have built their own.\nSometimes you hear the advice to \u201cscratch your own itch\u201d when it comes to product design. I don\u2019t completely agree. Got an itch? Great. Find other itchy people and sell them a backscratcher.\nBuilding a product, like designing a website, is a lot of work. It requires knowing your audience and purpose inside out. You can\u2019t fudge it and you can\u2019t just hope you\u2019ll find an audience for some old thing you have lying around.\nAlways consider the audience and purpose for everything you create. It\u2019s often the difference between success and failure.\nSolve the hard problems\nHuman beings have a natural tendency to avoid hard problems. In digital design (websites, software, whatever) the received wisdom is often that we can get 80% of the way towards doing the hard thing by doing something that\u2019s not very hard.\nDo you know what you get at the end of it? Paid. But nothing really great ever happens that way.\nI worked on a client project a while back where one of the big challenges was making full use of the massive image library they had built up over the years. The client had tens of thousands of photographs, along with a fair amount of video and a large MP3 audio library too. If it wasn\u2019t managed carefully, storage sizes would get out of control, content would go unattributed, and everything would get very messy very quickly.\nI could tell from the outset that this aspect of the project was going to be a constant problem. So we tackled it head-on. We designed and built a media management system to hold and process all the assets, and added an API so the content management system could talk to it. Every time the site needed a photo at a new size, it made an API request to the system and everything was handled seamlessly.\nIt was a daunting job to invest all the time and effort in building that dedicated system and API, but it really paid off. Instead of having the constant troubles of a vast library of media, it became one of the strongest parts of the project.\nTurn your hardest problems into your biggest strengths\nThere\u2019s a funny thing about hard problems. The hardest problems are the most fun to solve and have the biggest impact.\nMaybe you\u2019re the sort of person who clocks in for work, does their job and clocks out at 5pm without another thought. But I don\u2019t think you are, because you\u2019re here reading this. If you really love what you do, I don\u2019t think you can be satisfied in your work unless you\u2019re seeking out and working on those hard problems. That\u2019s where the magic is.\n\nThe new year is a helpful time to think about breaking bad habits. Whether it\u2019s smoking a bit less, or going to the gym a bit more, the ticking over of the calendar can provide the motivation for a new start. I have some suggestions for you.\n\nGet good at what you do. Practise your skills and don\u2019t just flit from one shiny thing to the next.\nRemember who you\u2019re doing it for and why. Consider the audience and purpose for everything you create.\nSolve the hard problems. It\u2019s more interesting, more satisfying, and has a greater impact.\n\nAs we move into 2016, these are the things I\u2019m going to continue to work on. Maybe you\u2019d like to join me.", "year": "2015", "author": "Drew McLellan", "author_slug": "drewmclellan", "published": "2015-12-24T00:00:00+00:00", "url": "https://24ways.org/2015/solve-the-hard-problems/", "topic": "process"}