Don’t get hung up on creating the perfect tool

22 July 2010 | By Iain Tait

A few years ago, if you needed to make something happen online you needed to build a tool. To do pretty much anything apart from displaying static stuff – even a simple two-frame animation – you had to be able to write some code.

But now the internet is awash with amazing tools. Free tools. Incredibly powerful tools that allow you to publish things, connect things, promote things and sell things.

Some of them are hosted tools designed for non-technical people like me to be able to set up and use, with idiot-proof instructions. Others are tools that would leave me stumped at the mere mention of “compiling”.

There are countless tools that can give you an immense leg up in terms of speed and huge cost savings, whatever the problem you’re trying to solve. So why aren’t we all just using free and common tools to deliver campaigns for our clients? Well, sometimes you need a tool that hasn’t been invented yet. You want to do something that’s totally unique. And the tool is the idea. That’s cool. We all love those kinds of things. And we should all be hunting for those opportunities. But more often than not, our reasons for not using tools are less laudable.

Creative people tend to want to (over-) define things. They feel as if their art requires them to have their own special tools, because they need to do more than standard tools will let them. Most of the time it’s nonsense, a strange type of tech ego fetish. It’s not uncommon to hear things like: “If we use tool X then we won’t be able to do it like we thought,” or “But we can’t control the quality of the video in tool Y.”

Yet just because it’s possible to make a tool to do a thing exactly the way you want doesn’t mean it’s right to do it that way. You may not like the way Facebook’s buttons look, but people know they’re buttons and they know what happens when they click them. By making your thing in Facebook look like the dashboard from Buck Rogers’ spaceship you’re not really making anyone’s day better.

Every time you commit to building a tool to do a job you’re also committing to keeping your tool functioning and up to date; making sure it remains relevant to the surrounding environment and the other services that exist in the wider web ecosystem. So if you’ve built your own content management system tool, you have to make sure it doesn’t still say ‘Send to a friend’ or you’re going to look like a right chump. And it goes way beyond social media sharing options to proliferation of devices, screen sizes, network capacity, and more.

Everything is likely to change in the not-too-distant future. So next time you’re thinking about how to pull off an idea, don’t start with asking what you need a tool to do. Ask what the tools out there can do for you and use that to help shape your thinking.

Of course, if you’re in the business of making tools and you’re reading this, then ignore everything I just wrote and keep up the good work.

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