Like everyone, I play different roles on different days of the week. From Monday to Friday, I get on the stage as a full-time employee (in India that is at least 3 hours extra on average).
Another role I take up on occasional Sunday evenings when the Monday blues hit is to come up with simple writing-based games. Along with my graduation project and this newsletter, audio blog, podcast…I truly don’t know how to label this now.
One thing common among all these roles and this is even a common aspect of all processes aimed at building good products, services, or experiences is testing. This holds true, whichever philosophy you subscribe to. The last step of the iterative process of design thinking is testing. Now if we come to the software development lifecycle (SDLC), it revolves around whether we’ve built the right thing.
So, in my day job, one of the things I do is to help with testing stuff. In the rest of the roles, especially the games that I try to build, I want people to test the stuff I come up with.
People who design games for a living call it playtesting. It is obviously the most important but, undoubtedly, the most difficult thing for me to do.
Testing allows us to make mistakes. In fact, the whole purpose of testing is to make mistakes. I mean, you break the system, so that you can fix it. You get to test your assumptions, get feedback, and understand exactly what to fix and people will get to know what you are trying to build. They will offer valuable suggestions. So yes, doing constant testing is super important.
The only problem is that it’s way too easy to say and extremely difficult to do.
What you are building started as an idea in some corner of your brain. You have poured in time, effort, love, and care to nurture this idea and bring it to where it is now. You have researched about this, slowly giving it some shapes within your head. Then you brought it to the real world. Yes, this is not the final form or even anything close to it. You want to make sure it grows into the best possible it can be. So you take it for testing.
The people to whom you intend to build, start using your creation and begin picking it apart.
The biggest pain with testing, and what makes it the most difficult, is not the feedback itself but rather the effort of not taking the testing results to heart. This is because people are criticising your thought process and, at the core, your intellect and thus your ego.
You may feel that time and energy have been wasted on all the issues being pointed out. Questions on whether to work on it further or if is it even worth it, start popping up in your head. Not to mention the sense of sunk cost.
One of the most common advice to not get bothered by testing outcomes is to not be attached to what you are building. They say, don’t consider your design as your baby. Now this is easy for me in my day job. My design gets shot down by clients or we develop a bug-riddled feature, I feel not so great but I am fine. But on the other hand, for things I really like doing, for things I pour my heart into, the feedback is brutal and it does affect me.
So how do I not get affected by the feedback from testing? Surprisingly I have an answer. This is from board game designers around the globe. Hours of listening to interviews, YouTube videos and podcasts.
Like everything, they come in threes:
What I am trying to build is not me. It has elements of me, but it’s not me. So, I need to put up a wall when necessary around me and keep it open around the things I am trying to build.
Do it as early as possible. Do it as often as possible. It’s like walking. I will get used to it and the legs will stop hurting after a while.
Go with specific intent so that I can ignore the feedback in other areas and not get overwhelmed. That makes sense, I mean everything is an experiment after all.
In conclusion, testing is still the easiest thing to say, harder to do and extremely difficult to digest.
