Parallels to iterative design with a little fiction and a little Tyson

In this week's reading on entrepreneurial discipline, I was struck by the parallels between managing entrepreneurial risk and the iterative design process I have been taught in my Human-Computer Interaction courses.

Both start from the premise that the experimenter (whether entrepreneur or designer) does not know everything about his market. In learning to iteratively design technology solutions that are both usable and useful, we are literally instructed to exclaim, "The user is not like me." The experimenter must create a low-fidelity prototype or "first draft," often on paper, which he then shares directly with users in the target market segment.

In sharing, the experimenter records each user's reactions and ranks them along various usability dimensions, for example, Jakob Nielsen's usability heuristics: seamlessness, error prevention, visibility of options and so forth. In all likelihood, all of the experimenter's assumptions will have been wrong (a good reason to start with field research, though this is by no means a magic bullet). He then applies his findings to subsequent rounds of prototyping.

For the designer, the number of rounds of experimentation, scale of each experiment and experimental fidelitydepend predominantly on the amount of time available prior to product release. For the entrepreneur, "fidelity" is represented most likely not by the medium of implementation but by its scope and degree of outsourcing.

I would be interested to see how the above usability heuristics could map to similar heuristics for analysis of venture experiments. If anyone would like to discuss this with me, I would be happy to share my hunches in more detail.

As an illuminating aside, iterative design was developed in response to an earlier computer science programming model known as waterfall design, in which the whole product/service is laboriously planned out in advance and executed in one fell swoop. As we have learned, entrepreneurial bootstrapping is a similar response to an otherwise full-scale release--a plan to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.

Of course, to be fully prepared for the experimental carnage to come--the proverbial punch in the face--I recommend you go into the process reciting the fiction writer's mantra (in response to fear of editing prose): "Don't be afraid to kill your babies."

You can picture Mike Tyson saying that too if it helps.