Great design is ruining software
The arrival of the smartphone has convinced the world of the value of great software design, but it’s not all good news
The smartphone has reached more people and delivered more value faster than any technology ever seen. Much of the world has had to adapt to this arrival, but software design suffered the greatest reckoning. As the smartphone ascended, developers finally adopted reasonable design principles, realizing that they could not pack every feature ever seen into the smartphone experience. This recognition of the value of design - and especially, minimal design - is a good thing. Mostly.
I could not be happier that the industry finally accepts that there are principles of design, and there is a practice and discipline behind building great software. It’s great that we’re seeing more focused software that does little, but does it very well, rather than the previous age of the GUI when software attempted to own large parts of our lives by doing anything and everything. For a long time, Microsoft Word was used by nearly everyone who had a computer, and their strategy was to ensure no one ever had a reason to choose something else by building every feature anyone might ever need; their toolbar was the canonical example of never saying no.
The smartphone changed all that. Those rows of icons would fill the screen on a phone and leave no room for typing, and of course, no one would use them anyway because of how different the usage patterns are. As people realized they could no longer just throw in the kitchen sink, they began hiring (and listening to!) actual designers, and those designers have been steeped in the culture of Dieter Rams and the minimalism of the Bauhaus movement, which is awesome. Mostly.
Unfortunately, the phone caused everyone to focus on the final design principle of Dieter Rams (“Good design is as little design as possible”), without apparently remembering the nine that came before it, or why they were earlier in his list. I get it; the design constraints in a phone are intense, and it might not be a good idea to minimize everything, but it sure is easy.
The consequence of this mobile brutalism is a new movement building simpleton tools: Software that anyone can use, but no one can become an expert in.
Trello is a great example. I adore Trello. I think it’s great software, and it’s clearly a success by any measure. However, for all that I’ve relied on Trello daily for years, I feel no more an expert than I did just after starting to use it. It’s not because I haven’t tried; it’s because there’s no depth. You can pretty much plumb the product in a couple of days.
That’s fantastic for getting new users up to speed quickly, but deeply frustrating after a couple of weeks. Or months. Or years. Compare that with Vim, which I still use for all of my code editing, yet it’s so complicated that most people don’t even know how to quit it, much less use it. I’m not going to claim its lack of user friendliness is a feature, but I will defend to the death that its complexity is.
Apple’s Notes is the ultimate expression of this trend in text editor form. It’s a fine text editor. I know some people have written huge, impressive programs in similarly simplistic editors like Notepad on Windows. But I personally could not imagine giving up keyboard navigation, selection, text munging, and everything else I do. The fact that complicated work can be done on simplistic tools speaks to the value of having them, but in no way invalidates the need for alternatives. Yet, on the current trends, no one will even be trying to build this software I love because they couldn’t imagine two billion people using it on a smartphone.
I think it’s fair to say that that’s an unfair standard, and even a damaging one.
I miss the rogue-esque exploration that tool mastery entails. It’s not that I want tools to be hard; I want them to be deep. I want to never run out of ways to invest in my tools. I don’t want to have to swap software to get upgrades, I want to upgrade my understanding instead.
But I look around my computer, and everything on it was designed for the “average” user. I was not average as a CEO with 40+ hours of meetings a week while receiving more than 200 emails a day, nor am I average now as someone who spends more time writing than in meetings. There’s no such thing as an average user, so attempting to build for one just makes software that works equally poorly for everyone.
It is a rookie mistake to conflate the basic user who will never plumb the depths of their tools with the expert user who will learn every nook and cranny of your software. It is a mistake to treat the person who sometimes has to solve a problem the same as a person who spends 80% of their time working on that problem.
I don’t want to be an expert in all of my tools - for all that I take thousands of photos a year, I don’t think I’m up for switching to Adobe Lightroom - but for those tools that I spend the most time in, that most differentiate me, I want the opportunity for true expertise. And I’d happily pay for it.
Back in the days when computer screens were tiny, there were plenty of stats that showed that paying for an extra screen would often give people a 10% or more boost in productivity. I know it did that for me. As a business owner, it was trivial to justify that expense. Monitors cost a lot less than 10% of a person’s salary, and don’t need to be replaced every year. Heck, the whole point of the automation company I built was to allow people to focus their efforts on the most valuable work they could do.
Yet, when it comes to software being built and purchased today, to the tools we use on a daily basis, somehow our software ecosystem is failing us. There is no calendar I can buy that makes me 10% better, no email client available that I can spend five years getting better at.
It’s great that people are finally making software that everyone can use, but that’s no excuse to stop making software for specialists, for experts, for people who could get the most advantage from that extra 10%.
Please. Go build it. I know I’ll buy it.
