In Getting Real: Ignore details early on Dan Boland of 37Signals, a reputable design and usability company that is breaking into the developer services market, shares about how important it is to rough out the details first and to not get bogged down by details. This is critical in most design and development situations. I’m going to warn of this one caveat: know your clients. If you’re going to build your own application, which is generally the focus of Dan’s article, you can work on the roughing out, and then get down to particulars and this would be a smart choice. However, I recently made the mistake of doing this on a client project and it did not get me any favor with the client. Because as we got closer to the release date they saw lots of features that were rough rather than fewer pretty features. We ended up nailing all of the needed features and they’re pretty polished, but it did not go how the client had expected. I learned a lesson in this and thought that others just might benenefit as well.