no one has ever stopped in a doorway to praise a hinge. that silence is the best review a door can get, and it is the one i am after.
what it looks like when it works
the interfaces i love disappear the moment i touch them. the field is already focused. the button is where my thumb was going anyway. the spinner tells me the truth about how long this will take and then turns out to be right.1
none of it demos
none of this demos. you cannot put the input was already focused on a slide. it is a hundred small decisions, each of them boring on its own, and they compound into a feeling that the software is not really there — that you are just doing the thing you came to do.
so when i ship something and nobody says a word about the interface, i write it down as five stars.
- the lying is the worst part. a bar that sits at 94% has taught the user that this software will lie, and they will carry that lesson onto every screen after it. ↩