The Quiet Machine
Notes on building things that don't ask for attention.
There is a particular kind of software that recedes. You open it, do the thing, close it, and your day continues. It does not buzz. It does not invite. It does not ask for your weekend. We have, in the last few years, seemed determined to build the opposite.
The quiet machine is older than computers. Pencils are quiet. Bicycles are quiet. The good kitchen knife is quiet. They earn their place on the counter by doing their job and disappearing into the hand. A great deal of what I admire in software is borrowed from this lineage — the hope that a screen can also hold something modest.
Surfaces, not stages
What I keep coming back to is the surface. A surface is where input and consequence meet. A stage is where the software performs. Most products today are stages: tabs that lean forward, animations that announce themselves, copy that congratulates you for reading it. A surface, by contrast, has the dignity of a desk.
The hardest discipline is to remove what wants to remain.
There is a temptation, when you have built something useful, to dress it up. Don't. The dressings will date. The usefulness, if you've found it, won't.
Three small rules
- The default should be the answer most people need most often.
- A motion that doesn't change a decision shouldn't exist.
- If the copy could be a tooltip, it shouldn't be a paragraph.
None of this is new. I am writing it down because I keep forgetting it.
It's a strange thing to advocate for restraint in a medium that rewards noise. But the few products I've returned to year after year all share the quality of a quiet machine — they stop being software and start being habit. That is the bar, I think. It is not impressive. It is just very, very hard.
— Everett
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