Nail Down Everything

I used to study things like semiotics and deconstuctionism, and they talk about the actually quite complex process of how words become meaning. There’s this idea that our brains are like computers that cycle through a cross-indexed list of synonymous meanings around a word until we land on the one that feels right. Each synonym shares in the total meaning of the word, and the number of them around an idea determine how many shades we can discriminate (like the Inuit with the 9 words for snow – can any of us visualize that many shades?). For all the meanings that can constellate around any broad term, there are lots of shades that *aren’t* it and just a few that are.

I don’t know if these theories have it right or not, but I can tell you that a lot of people use words as big fluffy cotton pads when they need to be more like lasers.

It’s one thing to be cottony in a non-executional field (although I’d argue it’s not good anywhere but poetry), but if words are going to result in major expenses, you’d do well to nail down meaning to a very detailed level. A word like “registration” may sound simple but really covers a wide territory unless you specifically define it – is it site registration or membership, how does one do it, through which channels is it accessible? The answers to these questions will play a major role in how you design the site or application resulting from your project. If the right questions don’t get asked or answered, people make their own assumptions along the way, often to disastrous effect.

Once you become aware of the cotton pad syndrome, you can think back and see how it preceded a lot of the screw-ups that undermined your projects in the past. Believe me, this is no fun when it happens. As a result, I’ve become somewhat obsessive about hunting down and doing a flying tackle on every ambiguity I come across.

Whenever someone uses a word cottonishly, I cross-examine them with very detailed follow-up questions to hem them in down to a very detailed level of specificity. I do this as gently as possible, but as you can probably imagine, I don’t win any popularity contests for it. Unaware of the sweeping generalizations they’re throwing around, people can find it either annoying or downright offensive to be questioned over something so obvious.

But what a difference it makes when you’ve nailed down every detail to such a degree of precision that you have 100% clarity on what you’re doing. This creates a solid foundation that’s much less likely to collapse when you put some weight on it. Do yourself this favor – you’ll be glad you did when you dodge the next bullet.