No amount of technical merit and storytelling can compensate for an interface that isn’t naturally appealing to people - form and function.
People who don’t do software for a living don’t care about the underlying versatility of a solution beyond their point-in-time use case. They experience it for a few hours or minutes. Not like you as a whole with the politics and business of it.
They conclude in binary:
- Cramped / Not cramped
- Performative / Not performative
- Clear / Not clear
- Beautiful / Not beautiful
- Cheaper here / Not cheap
- Found what I was looking for / I never do here
They don’t care whether you refactored your code, you referenced the color tokens true to their purpose, you stuck to content guidelines, your frontend exactly reflects the backend, you used heading-bold-24px over body-light-24px even when it looks off with the rest of the content, nada-nada - you prioritizing your methods over man. Your excellently done yet lifeless widgets of designs, art, and content that do not integrate to the last details when put together, aesthetically or functionally.
The wallet calls the shots. The customer has 2-3 choices anytime, unlike you as an employee working on that product. They look, compare, then pick “what goes well with them” - like fractals, like picking a rock from the ground, like picking a person to marry. Or they settle for what’s left (an essay for a different day).
To think about how humans choose? A question I’ve wondered in many contexts - there are theories:
- Taoism says you choose something because your hand moves toward it as naturally as water flows downhill. (There’s no freewill, it’s all destiny)
- Existential philosophy says choosing is an act of freedom and what you choose is insignificant. (Rocks are disposable to you, you’ll pick any to flaunt power)
- Phenomenology says we project our inner state onto outer objects while choosing. (If you have a scared face, you’ll pick a rough rock)
Drawing an inference from everything I know for now — let’s say on days when gods want the customer to choose and the customer is dying to exercise their freedom — the experience they pick isn’t the one adhering to invisible methods and preferences companies and teams use to make and justify decisions, but one that “feels like my own” to its last detail to the customer. And it’s never one micro-interaction, one copy, one color, one illustration, one happy flow, just cost, just spacing that does it, but harmony between the alive and dead parts of the entire software with the right form, functionality, and abstraction.
Questions emerge from that:
- Who decides these right levels?
I’m thinking.
- Can an aggressively vertical org structure with few tasteful VIPs do it?
Maybe. Seen that work very well so far.
- For how long?
As long as the VIPs stay. Founders are best suited as they are likely to have the longest tenure. Unfortunately, most don’t have the taste and skill to create memes. That’s why there are so many Linear’s landing page dupes on prod.