Notes

朝の商店街には、シャッターの上がる音と、パン屋の湯気と、掃除をする店主の挨拶がある。誰に頼まれたわけでもないのに、通りはいつのまにか整っていく。

こういう「気配の秩序」は、データにも設計図にも現れない。でも、まちの使いやすさを決めているのは、たぶんこれだ。デザインの話をするとき、私はいつもこの朝の商店街を思い出す。

The highest compliment a system can receive is silence. Nobody praises the ticket gate that just works. Nobody thanks the form that didn’t fight them.

Visible design asks for credit. Invisible design asks only that you get where you were going. Almost everything I admire is in the second category, and almost everything that wins awards is in the first.

Simplicity in a product is not a small feature set. It’s a small concept set — few ideas the user must hold to predict how everything works.

An app with fifty features built on three concepts feels simple. An app with five features built on five unrelated concepts feels bloated. We keep counting the wrong thing.

Things I noticed this week: the bakery reorganizes its entire layout for strawberry season. The station attendant bows to an empty platform at the end of his shift. The hardware store has eleven kinds of masking tape, each with a purpose someone could explain.

None of this is efficiency. All of it is care. The difference matters more than I used to think.

Asked twice this month, so for the record: a spreadsheet, a keyword tool, an analytics dashboard I check weekly rather than hourly, and a text editor.

Everything else I’ve trialed was a subscription that produced dashboards about the dashboards. The bottleneck was never tooling. It was having something worth saying and shipping it consistently.

Users don’t experience your interface. They experience their task, with your interface either dissolving into it or standing in the way.

Every moment a user notices the UI is a moment the UI took from the task. Some of those moments are worth it — delight exists. Most are just friction wearing a nice outfit.