Speaking of computers that used to stop running if you looked at them funny, a few years ago, I wrote about the Monkey app that was there on the original Mac. Many software engineers will recognize the premise – Monkey was just a chaos script randomly pressing mouse buttons and keys during the night hours, and if the computer crashed because of Monkey’s random actions, the team would be able to reproduce it and try to fix it.
I was also inspired to try a Monkey-like approach for something creative. In hindsight, it’s a very Unsung post, so you might enjoy it!
Also, in the post, I showed this boring version of Monkey:
Since then, I discovered a different version with its own icon, perhaps designed by Susan Kare:
(If creative use of randomness rings a bell, here’s also an earlier Unsung post about a different take.)
One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done.
The clicking around a ton is the important part. If it’s a page transition, that means going back and forth a ton. Click, back button. Click, right-click context menu, “Back”. Click, in-app navigation to go back (if there is one). Click, keyboard shortcut to go back. Over and over and over. You get the idea.
It’s kind of a QA tactic in a sense, just click around and try to break stuff. But I like to think of it as being more akin to woodworking. You have a plank of wood and you run it through the belt sander to get all the big, coarse stuff smoothed down. Then you pull out the hand sander, sand a spot, run your hand over it, feel for splinters, sand it some more, over and over until you’re satisfied with the result.
This is a clever metaphor and I wish I thought of this before. What follows is a specific story of finding a few dead pixels in between related interface elements, which is an absolutely perfect example of something with non-linear frustration: It might not register at all on the first try, but it will bother you 1,000-fold on the 20th go.
I was just on Internet Archive earlier today, uploading some documents I scanned this weekend. Their UI is… how would I put this… let’s just say Internet Archive makes Teams feel like Linear. (I love Internet Archive and their work and mission, but let’s be honest here.)
Yet, I found something marvelous. Whoever put the upload form UI together knew there will be people like me who’ll be filling out 20 of these forms one right after another. So they made sure every pixel in their form is clickable to edit the nearest field. And I mean, every pixel.
Whoever you are, you have my nod of recognition. In at least this one respect, it’s clear someone spent a lot of time with the sander.
