Open Projects: Please steal this idea
May 10, 2020open project
Open projects are small, fun projects in my head and have the UX sketched out, but don’t have the time to actually make. Designs are easy to copy (steal), though not as easy to come up with from scratch. Using design tools like Sketch and Figma, it's easy to create and share a design. I'm new to sketching out designs, because I've usually used bootstrap and other CSS libraries to design as I go and this series is a practice in sketching out narratives and design.
I usually have 3-4 ideas floating in my head and it helps to write it out, because then it forces me to either work on it or discard it. Although unlikely, I’d love to see anyone steal these ideas. These mostly include things I want to see, but don’t have the bandwidth to build. It should be specific. Building a general purpose robot, or underwater swimming pool is cool but also orders of magnitudes harder to execute. For that reason, consumer apps make a good candidate. B2B SaaS apps require so much business context and sales that it’s not worth putting out for free. Of course, The bulk of the work is actually building the thing.
It’s actually easier to come up with more ideas than less, because there’s less pressure to have a really good idea. Group of students judged on the quantity of photographs had better photos than those who were tasked on having one really good photo1. Can’t think of 5 ideas? Think of 10. Newton studied alchemy, physics, and religion, but it didn't matter that the other two didn't work out. Okay, that's enough pop psychology for today.
There are many projects that developers and hackers have spent so much time on but barely have any users. We don't sketch designs, write narratives and gather user feedback enough as engineers because it's easier for us to open our editor and start writing code. Validating the market before building has been said over and over again, yet as with most advice, it's easier said than done. It takes much less time to sketch out a design — no matter how simple — and show it to people to see whether they love it or just don't care.
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