Tools for makers need serious UX
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"Making tools for makers" is the theme I've settled into lately. And something I've noticed while working on it: tools aimed at people who make things demand a lot from the UX side.
The reason is that makers take their tools seriously.
They use the same things every day, and the tools sit right up against their thinking and the motion of their hands. Small differences in behavior end up shaping the rhythm of the work. So feedback comes back fine-grained — what to include, what to leave out, where things should sit on screen, what each key should do. On each of these, the user has a clear sense of how it should work.
You can't fake your way through. "Eh, this is good enough" doesn't pass.
Since shipping Kosshi, I've been getting feedback from a number of users, and the precision is something else. Some of it was at a level where I felt a bit shaken.
Things like "this is how this behavior normally works, but Kosshi doesn't do it that way," or "the display breaks when you use the iPad in this particular way" — feedback where I read it and immediately think, yes, that's exactly right. I've gotten a fair number like that.
That tells me the user is really putting it through serious use. It's a real match, and I feel it.
To respond to those, you can't just polish the UI surfaces. You end up rethinking data structures, lifting baseline response performance — real engineering keeps showing up.
As I wrote before, Kosshi's internals have ended up looking quite a lot like computer science. That's not because I find it fun in isolation; it's just what you have to do to clear the bar that a tool for makers needs to clear.
Looked at from the other direction, this is also a space where you can differentiate.
"Things anyone can think up and anyone can build quickly" — there are already plenty of those in the world. Whatever's fast to build, someone has probably already done. One more of them won't get noticed.
The space where serious UX is required, on the other hand, has a high technical bar, so not that many people come in. I've tried a lot of things along the way, and as someone who's been programming for a long time, I feel like I've finally found a field that fits me.
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