Say it

The moment you have something, your body wants you to start drawing. Drawing is pleasant, it looks good immediately and, above all, it lets you put the decision off. A sentence does not.

So before I open anything I write down what somebody has to understand in the first few seconds. And I write down who I am leaving out, which is the part that actually costs. Closing doors is vertiginous when the project is yours; every closed door looks like an opportunity you are giving away. But until you leave somebody out you do not have a product. You have a category.

You will repeat that sentence far more than you imagine. To the people you want using it, to whoever works with you, to whoever asks at dinner what you are up to. If it tires you the second time you say it, it is not the one. If somebody hands it back in their own words and gets it right, you are done.

One more thing, in case it helps. The copy of an interface is not the decoration you add at the end: it is the interface. The rest is boxes around some words. When the words are exact, almost everything else falls into place on its own.