Your Website Is a Rubik's Cube

My coworker, @jakedowns, has a Rubik's Cube sitting on his desk. It seems to serve as a physical manifestation of the gears turning in his brain as he's working on solving a development problem. He's actually  pretty good at solving them and can usually do it in less than a minute.

On occasion, I've happened past his desk and noticed that it has been arranged in a checkerboard pattern. Last Friday I decided that he needed a challenge so I designed a pattern and told him to replicate it.

And he did! However, the pattern I provided was for only one face and his solution was for only one face. At the time, I made a joke that "the requirements were met but the purpose was not fulfilled" because I wanted the pattern to be displayed on all six faces.

At this, I set to work plotting out all six faces. It took me hours, literally, to figure out a valid solution extending the original pattern to all six sides. It was a great exercise for me. I learned that the pattern does not work when using the colors of opposing faces for the pattern (e.g. blue and green). I also learned that not only do I have to account for all eight corners, I also need to account that the thee colors on each corner are in the correct position relative to the other two. I also exercised my spacial reasoning skills quite a bit.

In the midst of all of this, I was thinking about how websites are like Rubik's Cubes. Designing and building a website isn't as simple as solving a Rubik's Cube where each side is a solid color. Rather, every website is unique, perhaps similar to others, but still has it's own individual requirements, much the same way that I created a new requirement for what it meant for Jake to solve the puzzle.

Upon doing a little internet research, it seems that there are some 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 (that's forty-three quintillion) valid combinations for a Rubik's Cube. When solving one for the traditional pattern, there is a well-established method to do so. However, when trying to solve for a custom design, most, if not all of that goes out the window. You still twist and turn but the algorithms have to be all new.

The thing about websites is that you don't just twist 'em and turn 'em until you feel like stopping and saying "Solved!" You have a goal in mind. Sometimes it takes a lot of work to get it figured out exactly what that goal is. Then you twist and turn until what you have matches that goal. It's a complex process because no two solutions are the same.

Here are some practical takeaways to keep in mind:

• Your customer, no matter what they say, has a very specific result in mind for you building their website.
• It is worth every minute to take the time up front to do design and business analysis.
• Changes made once development (twisting and turning) has begun is going to affect the deadline and is likely going to mean that some things are going to have to be done over.
• Testers are happy to look at your design before development begins and look to see if the corners match up the way they should.

The next time someone says to you the words "simple website" or "simple change", hand them two Rubik's Cubes that have been thoroughly discombobulated and tell them to change one of them to match the other.