“Good” is the Enemy of Great Design

Jim Collins opens his book, “Good to Great” with the line “Good is the enemy of great.” I’ve also seen variants of this aphorism attributed to Voltaire too, but regardless of who first coined it, the point is this: if you settle for “good enough,” you’ll never get to “great.”

We’ve been experiencing this firsthand lately here at BXP Creative. Today I’m going to give you a little peek under the hood at what we’ve been building for the last month or so, and how we’re pushing ourselves to not just create something that checks off boxes on the project requirements list, but is really delightful to use.

Current users already know that we utilize what we call Genius Tools to collect information about a project and automate the creation of project briefs. We took a hard look at what we liked about that process and tried to distill it into as few steps as possible, collecting only the information we really need to get a project started. This is particularly evident in our new Logo Tool, the first of many different tools we’re building as part of the new platform.

In our new Logo Tool, instead of asking users to use a scale to rate the features of their logo (playful vs. serious, monotone vs. colorful, etc), we simply ask what they like. First, we offer some format choices (wordmark, pictorial, emblem, and so on) with good examples of each. The user can select up to two options for us to try in our designs. Next, we do the same with style. We allow the user to select up to three distinct style directions they’d like us to try out. This helps give us an idea of what the user prefers from a creative standpoint.

After this comes color selection. This one proved difficult for us. How do you create a way for users to provide accurate color selections, or specify HEX or RGB codes if they have them, and do so in a way that’s easy to use on both desktop and mobile? We wanted a system that works equally well for someone with a strong sense of their color options as it does for someone who might need a visual way to see their colors together on a screen before they know what they really like.

A color picker would be perfect for this job, we thought. The first one we tried had about 90 color options and took up a lot of space showing the swatches. Not a good experience. So we tried a few more that had a color selection feature closer to something you’d find in Photoshop. These were nicer, but not mobile-friendly, and we had a lot of trouble getting them to save data when there was more than one on the page at a time (which is obviously important).

After a good deal of persistence and a few weeks of banging our heads against the wall, we finally arrived at the color picker that would work best. It did everything we needed, is easy to use with a mouse or a finger on touchscreen devices, we can display as many of them on the page as we want, and they don’t take up a ton of space.

The takeaway here is that if we had just settled on something that was functional, but not truly easy and delightful to use, the experience of using the Logo Tool would have been that much worse. Good truly can be the enemy of great. We believe that it’s all the little things that really matter in design, down to the intangible feeling you get when you use a product. It’s important that we make the best possible system we can for our users, and we’re excited to keep forging ahead with additional tools and the API that will support the web platform, and hopefully some native apps further down the road.

Thanks for sticking with us, and we’ll have more to share soon!