UX lessons from a pottery professor about lean product design

The parable of the pots: Would you rather create one good thing or 50 bad things? Why embracing imperfection is the key to better UX

Pottery class by Anne Nygård (Source: Unsplash)

Lean or perfect?

Have you ever found yourself struggling to perfect something, endlessly tinkering with it until it’s just right? Maybe you are a UX designer, meticulously honing every pixel of your mockup to perfection, or a UX researcher, dedicating countless hours to crafting the ideal methodology for your upcoming study. Maybe you’re an artist working on a painting or a writer crafting a novel.

Whatever your creative pursuit, you know that feeling of wanting to get it just perfect before showing it to someone and moving on to the next thing.

But what if that approach was actually holding you back? What if the key to getting better at your craft was not to obsess over one single piece, but to create more, to make more imperfect things?

That’s the lesson I learned from a pottery professor who offered his students a unique choice every semester:

• Make 50 pots fast within the first 4 weeks of the semester and receive an automatic A (regardless of the quality of the pots)
• Or submit one pot that they spent as much time on as they wanted and have it graded on its quality (with no guaranteed grades)

In addition, the professor would select the best pot from all the pots created that semester, and that person would receive an A+. So who do you think earned the highest grades by the end of the semester? The fast pots made in large quantities, or the unique pots that were meticulously crafted over the entire semester?

The parable of the pots

At first glance, it seems like the students who opted to create one pot and spend all their time perfecting it would have the advantage. After all, isn’t quality over quantity the key to success? But year after year, it was the student who made 50 pots who created the best pot in the class.

Why is that? The act of creation is what helps us improve and become better at what we do — no matter if…