Leo

<blockquote> I strain to use my eye as an investigatory tool—as a pencil, with my mind the sketch pad. </blockquote> That’s Patrick Bringley in <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/all-the-beauty-in-the-world-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-and-me-patrick-bringley/2fa7f12b69035942?ean=9781982163310">All the Beauty in the World</a>, a great little book about his experience as a guard at <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/">the Met</a> but it’s also a book about loss, art, and looking intensely at things you don’t understand for long periods of time. I particularly like this bit: <blockquote> On and off, I have been reading a book about Egyptian history, and I am reminded again how different are the experiences of reading books and looking at art. The book’s information has pushed my knowledge forward. By contrast, coming into contact with an actual fragment of Egypt seems mostly to hang me up. This is an essential aspect of a work of art: you can’t empty it of its contents and patly move on. It seems to scorn a world where knowing a few bullet points about a subject is counted the least bit impressive. Indeed, bullet points are what it won’t spew. A work of art tends to speak of things that are at once too large and too intimate to be summed up, and they speak of them by not speaking at all. </blockquote> Words fail when it comes to software design, too. Books are wondrous, of course, but alone they’re not enough. You can’t become a great designer or a great musician or even a great writer by reading. It sure helps! Books expand the world and our place within it! But they still fail to do the work justice. Perhaps my favorite section is when Patrick describes how he looks at things. He has a technique: walk up to a Rembrandt or a Monet or an unfamiliar painting and try not to think about the genre or movement or artist. Instead, clear your mind and look at everything with kind eyes. <blockquote> Turning away from the picture, I look around the room and am brought to the verge of laughter by what I see. Here at close quarters are dozens of people from all over the world, live and in the flesh, every one of whom looks past their neighbors to stare at colorless, motionless pictures of people hanging on the wall. Real people, it seems, are just commonplace. We can see them any old time. Why would we give our attention to strangers when, in mere moments, they’ll pass forever from our lives? Georgia O’Keeffe here, as a work of art, has virtues the rest of us appear to lack. She is still. She is permanent. There’s a frame around her, putting space between her sacred beauty (an older meaning of the word sacred is “set apart”) and the profane, mundane world. I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore, and a work of art grants us that. </blockquote> Whenever Patrick investigates how he looks at something I feel leonardo-dicaprio-pointing.gif. That’s me! That’s what I do! Day in and day out: look at stuff intensely and think about how I’m looking, think about how I’m thinking. People who aren’t trained in software design have to trust the data or what the last person in an interview told them. But experts first and foremost trust their own experience: why am I feeling like this when I’m using this software? How do my hands move? Why are my eyes skipping from line to line in that way? Why do I stumble in certain areas? Why does that word in that button fail so utterly to woo me? <hr /> When I was a student learning about typesetting I would look and look and look, at different font sizes and line lengths and typographic styles. And there was a moment in college when something clicked in my mind: I was sat in my dorm room and I remember the moment I could suddenly tell good from bad. And not because what a book told me, despite me trying to read every single book about typography under the sun. Instead, I had learned to watch myself, to think about the movement of my eyes. I could detect in an instant when my hackles were up. Sure, I still wasn’t skilled enough to do the work or to set type in beautiful ways but my eyes could now detect beautiful typography from simply looking and looking and looking. I was shocked to learn that I had not become more sensitive to great typography, but I had become more sensitive to myself and my own intuition. (This is what expertise—slowly, painfully—feels like, I think.) <hr /> I mention all this because when it comes to design it’s easy to be a dick. Designers can whine and moan about proper punctuation and bad animations and lord ourselves over more junior designers or engineers who have not trained that sensitivity. Oh, you’ve never heard of lining figures before? You complete buffoon! But I want to approach software design like Patrick approaches art: with kind eyes. That doesn’t mean we should forgive performance bugs or design problems or wash away crippling typographic issues. Faux kindness to an ego-riddled designer who hasn’t met the mark always turns into real harm for the people who use our interfaces. But it’s so very easy to be judgmental, to dunk, to tear something apart and I don’t think you have to design the world this way. Maybe this isn’t kindness in the same form, the way that Patrick means it. But, if I may, let me rewrite what I quoted above: <blockquote> [Software design] seems to scorn a world where knowing a few bullet points about a subject is counted the least bit impressive. Indeed, bullet points are what it won’t spew. [Software design] tends to speak of things that are at once too large and too intimate to be summed up, and they speak of them by not speaking at all. </blockquote> Designers surely have to critique with a sharp, judgmental eye. The world is so confusing and there is so much bad software! It’s easy to direct our rage at the one point of confusion we can control! I hate this stupid button!!!!! Yet it takes great, heaping dollops of humility to approach something bad and, instead of listing bullet points, explain our feelings with kindness and curiosity. To offer critique only in the hope that this work can be better than it is today.