Epilogue Programming, Humility, and the Eclipse of the Self The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great. —Voltaire If you build user interfaces and your intuition is good, you'll be lucky to get things right about a quarter of the time, and you won't necessarily know which times you were right, If you build user interfaces and your intuition is bad, you'll get things right even less than a quarter of the time, but you'll probably think you're doing much better than that. If you follow the principles described in this book and the procedures outlined in the last chapter, your design skills and intuition won't improve one bit. You'll still be wrong a lot more often than you're right. But you may stand a somewhat better chance of being able to tell, after the fact, what you did right and what you need to try again. In order to do that, you will need onc thing more than anything else: humility. You will need humility to recognize that the users are always the final and most appropriate judges of your work. Even though you're the expert in interpreting your users’ comments and meeting their needs, their judgments of your work are final and without appeal. ‘You will need humility to recognize the transitory nature of everything you do. To do your job best, you must recognize that all of your code will ultimately be replaced. Frederick P. Brooks, in The Mythical Man-Month, made many programmers aware of the valuc of prototyping for the first time when he said, “‘Plan to throw one178 EPILOGUE away."’ Realistically, however, you must plan to throw them all away in the long run—a humbling prospect. You will need humility to be able to take advice from the nearly infinite variety of users and experts who may be able to help you improve your interface. You will need humility in order to be muthlessly honest about your own work. You must be able to recognize and admit it when your efforts have led you down blind alleys, and your work must be thrown away almost as soon as it is written. You will need humility in order to force yourself actually to kcep lists of everything that is wrong with your system, so that you or someone else can improve it in the next release. Designing user interfaces is extremely challenging and richly rewarding. There is a special thrill that one gets from sccing strangers using and enjoying the program that one worked so hard to write. It is, in the main, an anonymous thrill—great interface designers are rarely stopped on the street to give autographs—but it is a kind of satisfaction that would be familiar to generations of artisans since before the dawn of civilization. This familiarity is no coincidence. Despite all the novelty and complexity of modern computing, the skills involved in good interface design are not fundamentally new ones, but draw on millennia of human experience in designing and building artifacts. Like all good artisans, interface designers should focus all of their specialized skill, training, and experience on producing an artifact that is so well suited to its intended use that the end user will never once stop to think about the talented individual or group of individuals who worked so hard to create it. The greatest compliment that can be paid to an interface designer is for users to regard the interface as so natural that it never occurs to them that any special skill was required to invent it. Interface designers thus toil ceaselessly to make their own work invisible and their own significance largely lost in anonymity. The humility required to embrace such anonymity as a goal is the single most important aspect of the designer's art.