On Building Software

The Nth Impression

A feature should be judged by how we experience it the nth time — after we’ve gotten familiar with it. That is, after all, how people will view a thing for nearly all of its existence.

We usually give feedback to the designer or developer only after our first impression. The first impression is — like excessive planning — something we think is way more important than it really is. Better to let it settle a few days and then give your feedback. Even better to move something to a closed beta location so you can use it with real data for a little while.

Design mockups often cater to first impressions. And besides that, they have two forms of deception.

First, the designer will fake in data to shine the best light on the design. No designer wants to show you something that looks unbalanced or incomplete. Mock data has a way of making those worries disappear. (The better ones at least spend the time to craft realistic fake text not Lorem Ipsum).

Second, if you aren’t using the thing with real data, then you end up critiquing design not experience. Design helps guide the experience but the experience is the thing you want to get right.

In reality, most of the finer details of design go unnoticed by most people, and it’s your job to figure out which unnoticed pieces act as critical stagehands and which ones should get tossed out.