Take, for example, what I spent a good chunk of last week working on: an app that would replicate a feature lost due to an upgrade of a particular program.

We decided we had to write something to replace it, but tried and tried to come up with a “new paradigm” interface. Turns out the best thing we came up with was the ugliest thing we came up with … So we went back and said “Can we reproduce the look of the old feature exactly?”

Once we did that, the project zoomed along.