The Lure of Best

I do not know why anything works. English, electronics, cooking, driving, name anything. In middle school, when it was time to learn about subjects, predicates and all those other sentence diagramming miseries, I got some of my worst grades ever. Writing was definitely my strongest suit at that point, but when it came to understanding why writing worked the way it did, I was hopeless.

The reason for this is because I function almost entirely on intuition. I’m the ultimate learn-by-doing kind of person because the theoretical substance of any given thing is simply not something I am capable of grasping without considerable effort. With repeated exposure to many books and magazines, for example, I knew how a sentence should flow and what words belonged where. I didn’t know why. I could just sense the rightness or wrongness of the details.

This quality of existence is a curse in school since the bulk of studies rely on the absorbtion of theories or factoids. In a world where results matter, though, intuition serves me well. I make many mistakes in the process, but intuition lets me accomplish a great deal with minimal starting information. It also means I can fix any configuration of technology, short of breaking out a soldering iron (although even then, sometimes).

So it goes with usability. I don’t actually know what makes for good application usability, beyond obvious things like button size/placement and readable text. I do know what feels right, though, and more importantly, I know what feels very wrong. When I build an interface, it usually starts out pretty wrong. I beat on it and beat on it until all the suck goes away and I sense that it’s what it should be.

This is work. I can’t muster the effort to do it without a very specific lure: I need to know that the resulting product has a shot at being the best at what it does. This made Tallymander in particular very seductive: the competing products were so shockingly awful, both in appearance and usability, that all I had to do was apply love and attention to my own solution and I could easily ship the very best counting app in the whole store.

I have a hole in my soul. A deep, ragged, sagging, gaping wound in the very core of my being. The only way I know to fill this hole is to provide exceptionally good solutions to whatever problems I encounter. This makes product design an obvious vocation for me. (Incidentally, it also makes me a brutally effective salesman when I’m aligned with an array of products I love.)

Today I got this review in the UK App Store:

5 Stars

Very useful, well made.

I tried other counting programs and this one came out on top because of :

- Ability to count multiple things at once.

- Email feature.

- Ability to label subjects.

- Nice, pleasing  interface.

A polished program. Thankyou.

I didn’t build Tallymander because I thought it would be a blockbuster moneymaker. I built it because I knew someone, somewhere needed to count things, just like I do. When that someone went searching for a solution to that problem, I wanted Tallymander to satisfy their need without annoying them or worse: leaving them with the nagging feeling that something about it could have been done much better. For a customer in the UK, I seem to have made that magic happen. Even if I made not another cent off of Tallymander, it has done what I hoped for it.

With that pleasant surprise, the wound in my soul heals a little further.

Time to get crackin’ on 1.1.

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