
Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? - abstractbill
http://www.bikeshed.com/
======
paulgb
If you don't want to read the whole thing, here is the most important excerpt
(IMHO):

"Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval
for building a multi-million or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if
you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so
expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try,
they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details
before it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of interesting, and
very much to the point, examples relating to Los Alamos in his books.

A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those over a weekend,
and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared,
no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the
chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he
is _here_.

In Denmark we call it "setting your fingerprint". It is about personal pride
and prestige, it is about being able to point somewhere and say "There! _I_
did that." It is a strong trait in politicians, but present in most people
given the chance. Just think about footsteps in wet cement."

~~~
jamesbritt
How I Made the Same Mistake Twice:

So I'm contracting on this Web app, and I'm looking after the design and page
layout, and we have a workable prototype to show off to The People In Charge.

Right away, people are chiming in: Why is that font blue? Shouldn't that
background be white?

Endless reassurances that the look and feel is easy to change, and that what's
being presented is _not_ the actual design, mean nothing.

Mr. Smartypants then goes and creates a second stylesheet to show how easy it
is to change the look. That'll shut 'em up, he thinks.

Now they had _two_ not-real designs to nit-pick.

~~~
zach
Kathy Sierra expanded on this once:

<http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/dont_make_the_d.html>

By the way, the Spore team at EA are running into this issue of not tempering
expectations:

<http://reddit.com/info/1p4pt/comments/c1p5mo>

~~~
jamesbritt
Well, I've become a fan of DENIM; lets you create clickable site mock-ups that
no one (I think) would mistake for the real thing.

<http://dub.washington.edu/projects/denim/>

