People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole!
—Theodore Levitt
I read this today in the 2013 edition of The Design of Everyday Things, and oh goodness, is it true. For the vast majority of people, software is a means to an end. How easily we geeks forget that. The world is not like us.
My mother doesn't want to use Facebook. She wants to connect with relatives. She certainly doesn't want to remember her password, complete multi-factor authentication challenges, create a profile, change her settings, add people as friends, upload images, check her notifications… She wants to connect with relatives. What we techy people call “fun,” what we enjoy perfecting and tinkering with, my mom calls “crap that gets in the way of what I want to do.”
No one wants to use your software. Well, no one but the geeks like us, and even we don't want to tinker with everything. Most people most of the time just want to get things done.
How different would software look if we remembered that?
On the password front, I'm certainly not suggesting we sacrifice digital security for user experience—being hacked isn't a great experience, anyway—but let's use something better, like passkeys. They're just as secure, if not more secure, and they're practically invisible. People hardly even notice themselves using them. That's a good thing.
Irritability is not bad temper. Nor is bad temper irritability. Bad temper carries the heart into it. The bad tempered man really does delight to vex and torture. Irritability flames and is gone. But both ruin happiness.
Carlin had a way with words. This is a great observation, and it's about much more than driving. Whether we're talking about politics, religion, work, hobbies, or anything else, it's easy to criticize those who don't behave exactly as we do, with exactly the same level of enthusiasm. It's easy to excuse our imperfections by making them out to be the bad guys.
“In the beginning, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; later on, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; and still later, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers.”
I can't remember where I heard this, even though I heard it very recently. The speaker claimed it was a Jewish proverb. I can't find much information about the quote online, but this blog post (archived) similarly calls it a Yiddish saying.
Throughout history, every single time something's gotten better, it's become somebody has come along to say, “This is stupid. We can do better.” It's the critics that drive improvement. It's the critics who are the true optimists.
This is a slight rewording of something Alex Limi once said during an internal presentation at Mozilla. The point is not about usage, but rather creation. Building something simplistic is easy, but building something simple is hard. The observation stuck with me, and I think it's a great little maxim.
Think about it in product design. Picasa was simplistic, but Instagram is simple. eBay is simplistic, but Facebook Marketplace is simple. IRC is simplistic, but Slack is simple.
To be clear, I'm not saying Picasa, eBay, or IRC are incapable. On the contrary, they're too powerful. I prefer the designs of Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, and Slack for what they can't do. Of course, whether anyone should use Instagram, Facebook, or Slack is another question. Even cigarettes can be thoughtfully designed.