Not much surprises me anymore. After more than a decade spent providing boutique services, followed by the last 6 or so years strictly in software, I’ve really earned the increase in grey hairs on my face and head. However, one thing I continue to find absolutely baffling is the way companies and designers often attempt to design their software from the bottom-up, screen-by-agonizing-screen. That approach is categorically wrong. Any design or redesign must start from the systemic level, from the top-down.

What does that mean? Consider an application that most of us are familiar with, iTunes. If Apple came to me and asked me to simply redesign the home page for Videos inside of iTunes, without regard for the rest of the product, they would be setting up me—and the redesign effort itself—for failure. The Videos home page is one screen amidst a veritable tsunami of information. Anything we do to that page will impact the user experience of the entire product. To redesign that screen, large and important as it may be, in isolation is an inherent fail. By changing it without changing the many pages around and relying on it, we would simply be buggering up the overall user interface, no matter how much better that spot redesign might be.

Online surveys are one of the most commonly-used feedback mechanisms for businesses. And it’s no wonder: they are cheap to create, deploy, tabulate, report and share. They provide a degree of insight into how customers think and feel about your company, products and/or services. While getting valuable and insightful results is much more likely when the survey is being administered and interpreted by a trained professional, it is an unfortunate reality that most companies let untrained marketing or communications professionals attempt to create surveys. I’m writing today to try and help those intrepid souls.

While there are a variety of simple tips to help amateurs create better online surveys, the single most important by far is: keep it short. Most people will respond to a short, quick survey. Those same people will not respond to a long and arduous survey. Despite that, most customer satisfaction surveys are looooooong. For example, a hotel chain I stayed at recently sent me a 21 (!) page survey. Here’s how the transaction went:

1. Get an email asking me to complete their survey
2. Click on the link and intend to complete it
3. Arrive at the page and see there are only five questions on it
4. Heartened, fill the page out and click “Next”
5. Get an alert that I’m now on page “2 of 21”
6. Disgusted, immediately close the browser and return to my life

Most of our customers are relatively sophisticated with technology. They either own tech start-ups or are in a role where they are involved in the software, website, IT, digital marketing or some other type of technology within their company. Not surprisingly many of them carry powerful mobile computing devices and are far ahead of the general population in their adoption and use of these tools. In fact, if you are reading this, you probably count among these progressive few.

Sorry to burst your bubble and scuttle your budgets of time and money. It’s true. I’ve seen it dozens of times: clients come to us saying something has to has to has to be shipped in 12 weeks. We tell them there is no way that can happen, no matter how much they pay us. They disagree and pay us what is required. They are subsequently unable - between their internal approvals, back-end engineering, design integration, product testing, deployment and many other factors- to get their product shipped anywhere near the deadline.

Beyond the Sisyphean nature of the frustration felt by everyone involved, our relationship with the customer is ostensibly strained in these situations. On one hand, we’ve worked hard and quickly and done everything we could in the contracted time frame; on the other, the design remains incomplete albeit for reasons beyond our control. Most customers are reasonable and accept that the delta is caused by their internal issues. Sometimes we try to give a little extra to help them get over the hump. Every rare occasion an unscrupulous client tries to take advantage of the situation and compel us to work for free because of their issues. Either way, nobody is happy. Our goal is always to lead or help our customers in shipping incredible software, and making a reasonable profit in the process. If we wanted to afford yachts and vacation houses, believe me we would not be in the services business to begin with!

It is generally accepted among the design intelligentsia that Apple is designing better software and hardware than pretty much everybody else in the core areas they choose to play. Yet there is one area where they have notably failed - if only by non-participation - yet stands as one of the most vital hardware solutions in the present and future: docking.