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Field Notes

Field Note

What We Built for This Site and Then Deleted

Some of the best decisions here are things you will never see, because we built them and then cut them. Deciding what to throw away is the same judgment as deciding what to make, and it is harder when the making was cheap.

· 5 min read

Some of the best decisions on this site are things you will never see, because we built them and then deleted them. We worked up a luminous border treatment for the hero image as a set of options across a whole preview lab, tried it in light and dark, and reverted it because it did not actually make the image better. We drew a value map for the home page, first as a tall branching diagram, and scrapped it because it made readers scroll down to puzzle at something they could not follow. We built a readiness quiz that placed people into a level, then dropped it in favor of letting them choose for themselves. We removed a standalone diagnostic page once it became clear nothing relied on it. We built a round of home-page color and hero treatments and kept none of them, and we drafted and published a field note, then deleted it because on rereading we decided it did not hold up.

What we kept, beside what we built and deletedTwo columns. Kept, with checks: dark mode, the horizontal value map, the Perspectives and Tactics split. Deleted, struck out: the luminous hero border, the vertical value map, the readiness quiz, the diagnostic page. Caption: deciding what to cut was half the judgment.SOME OF IT WE MADE, THEN CUTKEPTBUILT, THEN DELETEDDark modeThe horizontal value mapPerspectives / Tactics splitThe luminous hero borderThe vertical value mapThe readiness quizThe diagnostic pageDeciding what to cut was half the judgment.

Deleting those things was not a failure of the work; it was as much the work as building them. The version that shipped is better for the ones that did not, and we made both calls, what to cut and what to keep, with the same discipline.

Deciding what to cut is the same skill as deciding what to make, and what you refuse to keep shapes a product as much as what you ship.

This is exclusion, which our note Taste Is a Muscle, Not a Gift calls the rep that gets skipped and the one that shows. It is harder now than it used to be, for a reason worth naming. When building something took real time and money, the effort already spent was a fair argument for keeping it; throwing it away meant throwing away the cost. When a tool can rebuild the thing in an afternoon, that argument is gone. The effort already spent is no longer evidence that the thing should stay, because the effort was cheap. The only question left is whether the thing is worth keeping, and answering that honestly means being willing to delete work you just made and liked.

That willingness is what judgment looks like in practice. A maker who cannot cut keeps everything that is merely good, and a product full of things that are merely good is a pile, not a product. Knowing which of your own things to throw away takes the same taste our essay The Discipline argues is the actual work now, and it is hardest to apply to what you have already built.

Where this goes next

The case for exclusion as a trainable skill, with the weekly habit of cutting one thing from your own work, is in Taste Is a Muscle, Not a Gift. The larger argument for why this kind of judgment is the job now, rather than the speed of making, is our essay The Discipline. The flip side, how the options that make cutting necessary get generated in the first place, is How We Used Preview Labs to Design This Site.

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