Today I moved my cursor over the boundary of a sidebar in some UI hundreds of times at different speeds. Designers ship where I work, and a designer had opened a pull request adding a tooltip to sidebar handles to teach users keyboard shortcuts and let them know they they could drag to resize. Looked great, very useful. We should ship it.
I realized how completely insane it is to be a designer of things for screen though, because there was just one thing that was bugging me: the tooltip appeared too quickly for me. I got a flash of tooltip when I crossed the boundary, at cursor-moving speeds I’d consider normal enough. It was maybe… 150 milliseconds from feeling great.
To designers making for screens, this will sound totally reasonable I think. I think it will sound reasonable that I crossed the boundary hundreds of times, too. To other folks, it probably sounds absolutely mad. Who cares about this tiny detail? Who will even notice? I suspect once enough of them accumulate, roughly “everyone.”
It reminded me of Ira Glass talking about adding 100 milliseconds more space between one piece of audio and the next. About the smallest of differences in when a piece of music starts when scoring the piece. Each one small, but they all add up—or at least he hopes they do. Maybe no one cares; maybe no one will ever notice.
It’s both unreasonable and beautiful to care about these details. Life is pretty short, and yet we spend a lot of it obsessing over the smallest details when it comes to things that we enjoy, and that we want others to enjoy. Yours could be about cooking, or gardening. I wish for everyone that they care enough about something.