Look and feel

Hi, bro!

What’s up? How is it going? Hope, you are well. Yes, I know you don’t like long texts as any busy person today. Twitter is our everything. But story which took about 2 years deserves few words, right? Please, take a look at this stuff and think about it for at least a second. I think it’s important and would like to discuss.

Let me start the story from the beginning. About 2 years ago I joined amazing company to be smallest and most useless person in the team. Working with guys who designed and created everything around was pure happiness. I learned a lot each day. After half of the year it has come to my mind that maybe I can help to improve one thing — how everything looks and how it feels. I’m not the best front-end engineer you have ever seen, bro, believe me. But I know few of them. After couple of conversations with great people from my network I found right designer who understood what should be done after 5 minutes of Skype call. It’s was the beginning.

Right before my first visit to the head office of the company we created our customer care service design concept. We took what company had at the moment and shown how it can be changed to get much more results out of the same resources. I’ve shown it to few people I knew there at the moment. They shown it to other. In 2 days it was presented to big managers. In 3 days CEO met me at the kitchen and said: “I have seen your job and it’s exactly the thing company needs from it’s employees”. Mind blowing!

Ok, you got it. What’s next? Well, to build the result having nice pictures is not enough. You need right people and proper technologies. And even if you have all of it motivation comes first. Why paying attention to UI / UX is important in the end? Why I am so obsessed with it that was ready to spend 2 years convincing everyone around and fighting for making things right? It seems like it is better to invest time into AI or performance improvements, isn’t it? Even blockchain sounds like a thing in comparison! Ok, ok, let’s add some special case and say that app which faces external user worth money on design. But who cares how internal systems look like, right? Well, yes and no. Let’s talk a little bit about obsession with the quality of things unseen by public and why it makes perfect sense.

I like to take cars as an example for the beginning. Do you have one somewhere around? I believe, yes. It looks great from the outside, correct? But what’s under the hood? Is it messy and dirty inside? Nope. Good car inside is organised. It’s perfect. Take a look. This is a classical way to present new model to the public:

See? Everything is open. Because when it comes to the real quality what’s inside is sometimes much more important than what’s outside. Of course, you can pretend and mimic. That’s why modern Chinese cars are basically ok when you see them on the road. But we still prefer to buy expensive German products because of what’s under the hood, mostly unseen and hidden 99.99% of the time.

But is this all about pure beauty? We don’t think that engineers in Audi or BMW move parts of engine here and there just to make it look nice, do we? So, why do we like how it looks without knowing how it works?

Let’s talk about another good example to clarify this fact. Airports. I’m ready to bet one of the most popular places to make photo in Instagram. Right after restaurants and beaches. Why? Well, airport is a symbol of lifestyle based on freedom of movement around the globe. And because of planes. They are awesome! Being first time in the big airport you can easily stuck in front of the window looking on different flying machines going up and down.

But was even one thing in those machines done just to make them look “nice”? Nope. Even more: if something doesn’t look good but it improves characteristics of the machine it would be modified without any regrets. But luckily this is not how nature works. Thing with good aerodynamic looks pretty for us. Efficient thing makes us wonder, it’s being noticed. And it’s seem logical to me. Why?

Well, I assume this interesting observation is based on evolution. What we can call the most impressive mechanisms ever? Animals. And for thousands of years our brain was trained to determine most efficient and dangerous of them. You know: you see the tiger, it looks perfect and you run out of it’s way without checking if it’s fast and hungry enough to kill you. Simple as it is.

We not just like what looks pretty. It is reversed. Thing looks attractive for us because of what this attraction means. Because of what under the hood. That’s why we like planes even taking into account that they were designed with only pure function in mind. As well as tigers or good car engines.

I think you’ve heard about the lessons Steve Jobs got from his father. Fifty years after the fence on his backyard was constructed Jobs showed it to the writer who worked on his bio - Isaacson. It was still standing and by the fact of existence recalled a lesson about making things of quality. Touching the boards of inside of the fence Steve said that “Father loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see”.

What we can get as the result out of this meditation? Well, if something doesn’t look perfect it is most probably not efficient and basically not good enough. You can’t talk about high quality in such cases.

Efficiency looks good for us. That’s how our brain is designed. So, it makes perfect sense to invest into look and feel of internal product, since it will make your processes organised and interactions inside of your system logical. You never have trifle in details. In the end of the day, approaching your product as nature approached tiger and engineers approached planes means learning from very successful thing makers. It’s by definition sounds like a way to great success.

Oh, ok… It took much longer to introduce the story than I expect. So, let me split it. I’ll drop you next part with history of actions, events and feedbacks pretty soon. It’s even more interesting in such way since I have no idea what’s the end of the story. See you, meanwhile, bro! Stay good!