Is That All?

Note: This post isn’t about the iPad. It’s about me and you, our bosses and most of all it’s about normal people. It just starts with a story about the iPad, because that’s the way it happened.

What did Yahoo’s bosses say when they saw Google’s homepage for the first time? Why are 37signals so militant about saying ‘no’ to extra features? What did the Apple engineers think when Jobs told then to make a phone with one button?

Last weekend I spent twenty minutes playing with an iPad on a stand in an airport. I opened Safari and read xkcd, Penny Arcade and Hacker News. I flicked through the pictures of some sunkissed holiday by the sea. I played a couple of not very good games. I wrote a short document. I watched a video. At the end of twenty minutes I wandered away feeling slightly uneasy, thinking:

Is that all?
— Me

As a programmer, I’m comforted by screens full of settings. When playing a new game the first thing I do is find the options and tweak the hell out of it before I’ve even played a single level. The iPad left me feeling somehow uncomfortable, as if I was missing some core element. Had I really seen all it could do?

That was when I saw it: in a handful of minutes on completely unfamiliar hardware and software (no, I don’t have an iPhone), with an unusual multitouch interface I’d just ‘done’ things without having to think about them, without having to learn anything, without having to struggle. The gap between wanting to do something and doing it was so short that, for twenty minutes, it ceased to exist.

Don’t worry, we’re almost at the end of the iPad bit.

I was asking myself what the iPad could do. The iPad wasn’t doing anything – it was letting me do what I wanted. It had been designed by people who loved me more than their product (as Gandhi says you should). Was that all? Yes, because playing around for twenty minutes was all I wanted to do.

The user interface should be like a soundtrack barely noticed by the user
— Steve Capps

Everything we create should aspire to this, should leave us – as programmers – wondering if that’s all and if we shouldn’t perhaps add a bit more. Scott Berkun (a genius and a craftsman) said all of this more than ten years ago and I’ve known about it for at least half that time, but it hasn’t really changed the way I write software because it’s too hard to just know when something’s simple enough.

The feeling of ‘is that all?’, however, the uncomfortable suspicion that I can’t really ship a product with just one button, that all the important companies have login screens – this feeling proves we are on the right track. It is an excellent guide. Our world is full of self-indulgent interfaces clamoring for our attention. Why should we keep making this worse? We have to be brutal with our interfaces. Strip everything out. Consider every single piece of text as being a waste of the user’s time reading it, every control an unnecessary, unpleasant intrusion.

The user’s attention is a limited resource and we should heavily optimize to minimize our impact upon it. We must always, always remember that nobody wants to use our software – they want to finish their work and go play outside.

It’s hard. It’s risky. It’s easy to defend a new dialog as full of buttons as the old one. Our colleagues and managers live in bizarro world, believing our software has value independent of the things it helps people to achieve. They don’t want the new startup screen to have just 10% of the controls of the old one.

That’s not progress! Progress means more! Deleting things isn’t doing work! It’s anti-work!
— A stupid person near you (or, possibly, you yourself)

I’ve felt this, even if I haven’t said it. There’s this massive tension between writing something to humbly serve people you’ve never met and may never meet, and writing something your boss and colleagues will approve of. Yet we have to try, because the way software has been written for the last twenty years is making people unhappy.

Our calling, our duty, is to write software that will make our colleagues, bosses and competitors scoff and say “Is that all?” while making the lives and work of real people simpler, easier and less stressful. Our customers will love us for it – we just need the courage cut and hack and tear down everything that’s not necessary to get their work done and to put it out there for them to use.

Postscript: What am I doing about this? My startup, CodeChart, is making profiling very simple and very beautiful; the old generation of tools are so ridiculously overcomplicated that most people never use them. It’s in closed beta at the moment, but have a look at our getting started guide to see how it works and feel free to sign up for the beta if you’ve got some .NET code you want to look at. I know, I know, other languages – including my beloved python – are coming later!

Note: Yield Thought has moved to http://yieldthought.com – check there for the latest posts!