Every screen you have shipped
was checked by one body.
Yours.
Your eyesight, at the distance
you sit from that monitor.
Your hand on a mouse
that has never once missed.
Your ears, which were not needed.
Your patience, which was endless,
because you already knew
where everything was.
That was never decided.
It is only who was in the room.
Look at what it leaves behind.
A menu that opens on hover,
which means it does not open
for a finger or a keyboard.
An error announced
by turning a border red,
to somebody who cannot see red.
A container with a fixed height,
generous until the text is set
to twice the size,
and now the confirm button
is below the edge of a box
that does not scroll.
A dialog a keyboard can open
and cannot close.
A form that times out
according to how fast
you fill it in.
A price rendered into an image
so the font would be exact,
and now it cannot be enlarged,
selected, translated
or read out loud.
None of that appears in your numbers.
The people who cannot finish
do not write in to explain.
They go,
and the ones who reach support
are the ones
who could still reach support.
Now the direction of travel.
An audience only ever widens,
and it ages every year,
which your interface does not.
Everyone arrives eventually
at larger text,
stronger contrast,
one hand on a train,
sun on the screen,
an afternoon when the small grey label
is simply not there.
And this is skeleton, not paint.
A div with a click handler
has no name, no role, no state,
and no position in the keyboard order.
Ten of those inside a design system
is one defect
stamped onto every page
you will ever ship from it.
Which is why the retrofit
gets priced like a rewrite,
and why the only cheap hour
is an early one.
Take that hour this week.
Unplug the mouse
and do your own main flow.
Then set the text to double
and do it again.
You will find things
that have been sitting there for years.
You are not building
for strangers with a condition.
You are building
for yourself at sixty,
and that person
is not going to file a bug.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)