Who the game is for

A woman in Doha has spent a year designing a board game for families with young children. One evening she lays the prototype out on her dining table and asks a few friends what they think.

The easy answers arrive first, and they are all about the friends. Too bright. The rules feel slow. Not the sort of thing they would play. All honest, and almost none of it useful, because none of the people at that table is seven years old, and none of them is a parent trying to keep three children seated for forty minutes.

Useful feedback takes a step sideways. It tries to sit in the chair of the person the game is meant for. A child who cannot read yet will want to know whose turn it is without asking. A tired parent will want the pieces back in the box in under a minute. Someone buying it as a gift will judge it by the lid. Those are things she can work with, because they are about her customer rather than her guests.

It needs a little imagination and a little humility. Nobody has to be a child to say something helpful about a children's game. They only have to stop treating their own preference as the test.

Finished work asks for something else. Once the game is printed and boxed, there is nothing left to fix, and a list of what someone would have done differently helps no one. What helps is finding a few things that are true and good, and saying them out loud.

I do not think that is flattery. Someone who made a thing, cared enough to finish it, and then trusted us with it has already done two hard things. Those deserve to be noticed first.