The code was fine.
A reflection on years of building things and realizing the hardest problems aren't always technical ones.
There’s a particular frustration that arrives when you’ve built something that works perfectly and nobody uses it that much that you expected.
The code was fine. The thing was wrong.
That gap, between what engineers optimize for and what people actually need, is where design lives. And I’ve come to think it’s the more interesting problem.
What shifted
I started keeping notes every time I saw a technically correct solution that felt wrong in use. A year in, I had two dozen examples. They all had the same shape: someone (often me) had solved a problem without asking whether it was the right problem to solve.
Design isn’t aesthetics bolted on at the end. At its core, it’s a discipline for asking better questions before writing a single line of code.
What I’m building toward
I don’t have it fully mapped out yet. For now, that means paying closer attention at work, and reading about the point of view of people in design community, to the decisions that happen before anyone writes code.
This blog is part of the process: a place to think in public, document the work, and show that the shift is genuine.