Bill Gates wrote a book called “Business @ The Speed of Thought”. I don’t remember exactly when I read that book, but it did impart me the sense of urgency one needs in business, and in design.

Fast forward to recent times when I was working in an agile software development project. User stories are the holy grail for design & development. People revolved around stories, epics, acceptance criteria and got the work done in sprints.

In one of my projects for a telecom operator, I was designing the reports module. I sketched two explorations of the UI.

Here is how the UI is supposed to work – It is a progressive disclosure (step wise reveal).

1) On the page, only Data Source choice is seen first. User starts with a selection of data source.

2) Report selector is then shown to the user. User chooses a report name.

3) The page shows up the report columns to build the query.

4) The user clicks “Generate Report” button and the report is shown to the user.

Exploration #1

Exploration #1

Exploration #2

Exploration #2

Notice the differences in the approach – in Exploration#1 report column selection can be done by drag-n-drop of column names. In Exploration#2, there are additional filters for reports, “Save as Favorite” action to the report, contextual data presented to the user as “related reports”.

Exploration#2 was finally chosen by the development team.

Time to create these two explorations, discuss and select was 1 hour.

Time is the essence.