The Guilt of Caring About Design Details in Software Development [video]

I’ve been running a software startup for the past four years, got burnt out and decided to shut it down. I couldn’t really explain why I felt so burnt out until I saw this fireside chat interview with Jony Ive.

After watching the interview, I realized that I was subconsciously feeling guilty for caring the things I deeply enjoy — obsessing over crafts — which are the things that makes the experience of using software joyful.

In his interview, Ive mentions how things that are difficult to measure - things designers and creatives bring - are equally important as metrics we can track. At one point, he catches himself saying "sorry this is such a trivial example" when describing his passion for cable packaging design. This struck me deeply, why do we apologize for caring about these "trivial" details in tech?

Before my startup, I also was an industrial designer. I won a national award and I worked at one of the top industrial design firms in Silicon Valley. As an industrial designer I spent most of my time on making the product more joyful. Industrial designers obsess over every aspect of a product's lifecycle: the curves, colors, materials, the clicking sound, the smoothness of hinges.

After I spent my first three years of my career as an industrial designer, I got intrigued in the startup world. I taught myself coding and started vertical professional networking platform. We raised some money and made an impact — built into one of the biggest community within the vertical.

As I got myself into a startup ecosystem, my team and I fully embraced the “best practices” when building a software startup.

- We set a north star metric and input metric for the north star metric and focused my entire team on input metrics. - We interviewed many customers to identify Jobs-To-Be-Done - We shipped many embarrassing features to see if we’re solving the JTBD. - We prioritized pain killers over vitamins. - We tried to leave out our “personal opinions” and played the numbers game.

Following this made us grew our metrics but it didn’t necessarily made using our product joyful. Users would complain how buggy the software is, how the software was confusing because we would launch many experiments and yet they would still use it because it was the only vertical solution they could find in the market.

More importantly, we didn’t really feel joy when we were building things. Our weekly meetings reviewing whether experiments moved metrics (they often didn't) became exercises in stress and anxiety. The purpose of creating something people valued had morphed into a joyless pursuit of numbers.

I experience this from most of the softwares I use. I often don’t experience joy using the software. I use it because it’s functional or in worse cases because there are no alternatives. Jony Ive explains the cause of this as us the builders regarding these things as trivial, something that isn’t equally important as the things that moves the needle this week.

Despite being moved by Ive's perspective, I remain somewhat skeptical. Is joy truly "equally important" as solving immediate pain points? When you're starving, you don't care about ambiance - you just need food. Most startups fail because they don't focus on burning problems. Yet by dismissing joy as secondary, are we condemning people to less fulfilling digital experiences? What's the point of technology if not to enhance life?

On the other hand this mentality exposes the consumers of the technology feeling less joy in their day to day and what is the point of life if we don’t experience joy.

So I’d love to hear your take:

- Have you ever felt guilty for caring about details that don’t “move the metric”? - Is joy in software a luxury, or a necessity? - Are we — as a startup culture — too quick to dismiss aesthetics and user delight? - Or is Jony Ive just being idealistic because he’s never run a startup?