It’s an age-old debate, but as I get older, my perspective is changing.

I feel increasingly frustrated by tools that don’t work smoothly; tools that weren’t thought out very well. And I ask myself, wouldn’t my life be better without these?

TL;DR The economic incentive for product development is not always aligned with what makes the world a better place. Tools that make people more productive do not necessarily make them happier. As creators, we should first-and-foremost create things that are pleasant to use, even when it’s not economically optimal for us or the companies we work for — economics should serve humankind, not be our master.

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I’d be remiss creating such a post without whining about some concrete examples:

My Washing Machine

My washing machine1 has a “quick wash” setting that can do a load of washing in about 30min — great for those in a rush. And it allows you to further customize the quick wash with things like temperature and spin speed.

But for some unknown reason, it doesn’t allow you to select the maximum spin speed while in the “quick wash” setting!

If you want your clothes well-spun, you need to select another setting, the quickest of which is “whites”, and takes three-and-half-hours!

There’s a work-around, which I use most times — you run the machine on a quick-wash cycle (30 min), and then afterward change the setting to “whites” and then select the sub-setting “spin only”.

There are many other confusing and frustrating choices made for the interface and control of this machine, but it would take a whole post to go into them all!

How many extra man-hours would it have taken that company to properly think through the HMI2 design of the washing machine? How much extra would that have added to the price of each machine?

And here’s a deeper question: does the existence of this washing machine design make the world a better or worse place? If we could magically remove all washing machines with this design from history, would we be better or worse off?

What does it even mean to be better or worse off? This depends heavily on your world view. If you are a hedonist, then happiness/pleasure is the ultimate goal, and you can mentally compare the global happiness with or without this washing machine design in it, and make a value judgement about whether the washing machine is a net win or loss.

The difference between the two hypothetical worlds is subtle and complicated. The annoyance I feel when I do the washing is brief and small, but it’s multiplied by the thousands of people who have a similarly-designed machine.

And if we magically removed the design from the world timeline, we’d also be removing the satisfaction I felt when I discovered the work-around, and the catharsis of complaining about it in this blog post, or the social bonding it provides between people with the same issue who can enthusiastically affirm each other’s miserable experiences of such a damned machine.

But even with all these “benefits” of bad design, I honestly believe that we’d all be better off, in at least a small way, if this design didn’t exist.

So, what does this mean? Should humankind band together to create the perfect washing machine — a design which can be used for hundreds of years into the future, making people all of the world happy or even excited to do their washing?

In principle, I’d say “yes”. If we as humankind had collectively spent our efforts creating just one “great” washing machine design instead of a mix of good and bad designs across many companies, we’d probably all be better off overall.

The reality, of course, is more complicated. Different people’s ideas of the “perfect washing machine” are different. Technology makes this a moving target — the best washing machine 1000 years from now will be much better than the best we can do now, but we don’t expect a washing machine company to internally do a thousand years of technological research before creating their first product!

Adobe After Effects

Adobe After Effects is software for creating and editing video and animation. I learnt how to use After Effects this year so I could create little animated diagrams like that in my snapshot-vs-bundler post.

I find After Effects to be a really interesting example when it comes to armchair-philosophy about product quality. After Effects is, in my opinion, incredibly poorly thought out and frustrating to use. But it is also the only software that can do everything that it does, and using it makes you 100x more productive than if you were to try to do the same animations/effects manually.

I won’t go into a lot of specifics of what I think is bad design in After Effects, but I can’t help but mention one example: you can’t copy-paste something from one project to another (in fact, you can’t even open two projects at the same time). If you designed something great in one project and want to use it in the next (reuse, DRY), it’s a complicated and time-consuming process to export parts of one project into a temporary project and then import the temporary project as a nested child of the second project, from which you can now copy and paste.

You’re welcome to disagree with me and think that it’s a great design. The thought-experiment remains valid: in cases where a tool achieves something that was previously unachievable, or boosts their user’s productivity by some factor, is it better for the tool to have more capability or to be more pleasant to use?

The answer is not completely obvious, and it really got me thinking. My mind is in the weird paradox of simultaneously thinking that my life is worse off with After Effects while also I choose to use it because nothing else is available to do the job.

I wonder how many other people might also be in a similar position, perhaps frustrated by tools they use, but pushed to use them because the tools make their competitors more productive. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma situation (wiki).

50 years ago, nobody was complaining about the lack of After Effects software — they were fine with its absence — but today, we complain about its flaws. We’re “forced” to use it, either because our competitors in the space are using it or, in my case, because the mere knowledge of its existence makes work without it feel much slower, which itself is frustrating.

I honestly think the world would be a better place if After Effects didn’t exist and if knowledge of its absence also didn’t exist, nor a craving for something like it to exist. Or even better, the world would be a better place if After Effects was created with more design thought, making common workflows easy and pleasant, even at the expense of its variety of features.

Lessons

As a software engineer, I’m one of the lucky few who are actually contributing to the development and design of these kinds of tools. So what kind of lessons can I learn from some of my frustrations with other tools, like the washing machine or After Effects?

For me personally, the lesson is that quality is far more important than quantity. I think that humankind will be better off with fewer tools and less productivity, in exchange for tools that are more pleasant to work with. It’s better if technological development is slower, maybe 20 years behind where it would otherwise be, but the technologies developed are robust, dependable, and a pleasure to use.

In some ways, this goes against modern business practice. In our capitalistic world, there’s a temporary advantage gained for using a tool that makes the business more productive, even if it makes its employees less happy — the benefit is negated when the competitors do the same thing, removing the competitive advantage of the productivity boost and driving down overall prices of the product (but leaving employees still unhappy with the status quo).

Likewise, on the other side, it’s advantageous for a software company to sell tools that deliver the maximum economic value to their users, not necessarily maximum pleasure and peace. Remember that automating the repetitive parts of a user’s job does not necessarily make their life better, it just changes the nature of their work (now their job is about running the automation software). If a new piece of software allows users to complete their work in half the time, they don’t take the other half of their time to sit in the park and watch the birds play in the fountain!

If you create a tool that delivers more productivity in a way that’s more frustrating to use than the less-productive way, the machine of capitalism forces people to use your more-productive tool (which may make you rich in the process!) at the expense of increasing net frustration in the world.

Microvium

(Non-technical audiences may want to skip this section)

Microvium has parallels with After Effects, in that it’s a new tool that achieves something that was previously unachievable (it brings JavaScript to devices with only 16kB of flash). It boosts productivity significantly over alternatives such as EmbedVM.

So would it be ok if Microvium brought these benefits but was frustrating to use?

I think not. I’ve spent considerable effort in making Microvium as easy and pleasant to use as possible. For example:

• I take great care in the full experience of integrating and using Microvium.
  • The one-liner install for node hosts, or the two-file copy-and-paste for C hosts (one h file for the interface, and one c file for the library).
  • The getting-started guide demonstrates this to the extreme, leading the user incrementally through all the concepts, building up to a full native host example.
  • The getting-started guide is even part of the regression tests — the automated test infrastructure literally extracts the example code from the getting-started markdown file and make sure it all still works. There’s little more frustrating than an outdated or incorrect introduction to a new tool.
• I spent a great deal of effort making the FFI3 design super simple.
  • I hope that the way I designed it seems “obvious” and “intuitive” to people looking at it in hindsight — this is the way that designs should be. When you read through the getting-started guide, you probably don’t think at all about how good or bad the FFI system is. It’s hopefully invisible to the user, in the same way that a good washing machine should be invisible. It should just do its job, in the least-frustrating way possible.
  • Compare the FFI design of Microvium with that of Node.js for example, where one requires complicated binding files, additional configuration files (e.g. binding.gyp), the need to understand N-API vs NAN vs the V8 API, etc. In Microvium, you can export a JavaScript function to C code using a single line of JavaScript code and no configuration file is needed:
    vmExport(1234, sayHello);
• Even for something like the module API for Microvium (for node.js hosts), which many people won’t encounter directly, I put a great deal of thought into making the model as conceptually simple as possible.
  • Compare to something like the Compartment API for JavaScript (under development), where the explanation of its module API necessitates the definition of 6 different kinds of “module specifier”, and the distinction between “resolving”, “loading”, “binding”, and “importing”. While Microvium does all of these, it doesn’t require the user to understand these concepts in order to use it.

This is to say that I’m practicing what I preach. However much I may fall short of the ideal, I put a lot of time and energy into making Microvium a pleasure to use and simple to understand, at the expense of not delivering as many features and it taking longer to develop.

I believe this was the right choice, and I’ll definitely apply it to other projects moving forward.

What are you optimizing for?

I’ll conclude by asking the question: what are you optimizing for?

If you are a manager or leader at a company, you may be inclined optimize the company to produce profits. You may even have a fiduciary duty to do so on behalf of your investors.

Sometimes the profit incentive is aligned with making good products: after all, happy customers are returning customers.

But clearly that’s not always the case — it’s common practice to release buggy software early, so you can iterate on it and use your users as a testbed to weed out the bugs. It’s common practice to “fail fast” in small startups — getting new ideas out the door quickly so you can establish their efficacy in the market, rather than spending significant time designing something that might be pleasant to use but nobody wants it because the idea was flawed. It’s common practice to aim for a first-mover advantage, especially in markets with a network effect, to trap people in your ecosystem before competitors (who may have a more pleasant product but were slower to get there) have a chance to penetrate the market.

Should fiduciary duty or duty as an employee transcend the betterment of mankind?

What goals are you optimizing your products for? What are you optimizing your company for? What are you optimizing your life for?

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1. Actually, my housemate’s washing machine 

2. Human-machine interface 

3. Foreign Function Interface — the way in which script code communicates host code and vice versa