The Broken Window Theory in Product Design - DESK Magazine

I just recently noticed this on a project I was working on. During the project we postponed a lot of small little things. "Let's do it later" we said. A classic mistake.

As a result, we as a team felt increasingly less motivated to work on this particular project. I felt that everything was falling apart, I wasn't happy with it but I couldn't tell what it is that bothered me so much.

That made me think of the Broken Window Theory. So we took one day to fix all the broken windows. Focus on the small details, clean up some code, fix all the seemingly small and unimportant details.

After that day I started to appreciate the project again. It's almost like it transformed, even though we didn't really change anything big.

By fixing all the "broken windows" we were suddenly able to make good design decisions again. Our work became more focused and it gave us a positive push of motivation. On top of it, it prevented further "broken windows".