Leon Mika

DDH wrote a post yesterday that resonates with me. This is how he opens:

Programmers are often skeptical of aesthetics because they frequently associate it with veneering

I doubt DHH reads this blog, but he could’ve address this post directly at me. I’m skeptical about aesthetics. Well… maybe not skeptical, but if we’re talking about personal projects, I do consider it less important than the functional side of things. Or at least I did.

He continues:

Primary reason I appreciate aesthetics so much is its power to motivate. And motivation is the rare fuel that powers all the big leaps I’ve ever taken in my career and with my projects and products. It’s not time, it’s even attention. [sic¹] It’s motivation. And I’ve found that nothing quite motivates me like using and creating beautiful things.

He was mainly talking about the code design, but I think this extends to the project’s UI and UX. Particularly if you’re building it for yourself. Maybe especially if you’re building it for yourself.

And this is where my story begins. From the start I’ve been putting off any task that would improve the user experience on one of my side project. I considered such tasks unnecessary, or certainly less important than the “functional” side of things. Whenever faced with a decision on what part to work on next, the user experience work was left undone, usually with a thought along the lines of “eh, it’s UI stuff, I’ll do it later.”

But I think this was a mistake. Since I was actually using this tool, I was exposed to the clunky, unfinished UI whenever I needed to do something with it. And it turns out no matter how often you tell yourself that you’ll fix it later, a bad UI is still a bad UI, and it affects how it feels to use it. And let me tell you: it didn’t feel good at all. In fact, I detested it so much that I thought about junking it all together.

It was only when I decided to add a bit of polish did things improved. And it didn’t take much: just fixing the highlights of the nav to reflect the current section, for example. But it was enough, and the improved UI made it feel better to use, which motivated me to get back to working on it again.

So I guess the take away is similar to the point DHH made in his post, which is if something feels good to use, you’re more likely to work on it. And sure, you can’t expect to have a great user experience out of the box: I’ll have to work through some early iterations of it as I build things out. But I shouldn’t ignore user experience completely, or defer it until “later”. If it’s something I’m using myself, and it doesn’t feel good to use, best to spend some time on it now.