In my day job, I try and keep myself from complaining too much or too often, mainly because my boss has a decidedly different definition of “frustrating” than me.  He (who, incidentally, is not a designer, and would be the first to admit it) spent the first part of his professional life working for oil companies.  He was sent all over the place–he spent time on actual oil rigs in rickety laboratories, and not infrequently he’d have to drive 50 miles to get to the only functional telephone for miles.  If I’m being particularly verbal about my daily struggles, he’ll occasionally remind me that my difficulties aren’t all that bad (relatively speaking!) by saying things like “That’s frustrating?  No, no… frustrating is [insert various perilous oil-related story here].  Frustrating is [insert an increasingly improbable-sounding oil story here]. Etc.”

Given his background, I can appreciate that his definition of frustration clearly involves a degree of physical brawn and time waste that I don’t have to deal with.  But, in my own defense, I think it’s also fair to say that he, as a non-designer, may not fully see the amount of sheer brainpower, effort, energy, refinement and polishing that goes into designing a successful interface.

What I call a “successful interface” is one that is so simple and so elegant that users just naturally understand it (including my boss!).  If a user–any user–has to think at all about what he or she is doing, the design is a failure.  It’s a zero-sum game, and it’s incredibly challenging, especially in instances where you may have to defy conventions because you’ve found that the conventions don’t hold true in your particular frame of reference.

People like me are paid to come up with these perfect interfaces, and I’ll be the first to admit that we aren’t successful every time.  Rare indeed is the project where I hit a home run on the first swing of the first inning.  What usually happens is that I’ll come up with an idea and have it implemented only to later be forced to make a half-dozen “patches” to fix holes that I didn’t see in my initial solution.  Just like a tire, you can make repairs so many times, but eventually you just have to scrap the whole thing and start over from scratch.

So let this serve as my mea culpa to my friends and loved ones.  In recent weeks I’ve been under an increasing amount of pressure to make this kind of magic happen multiple times over.  I will say, though, that  it’s utterly amazing and terribly gratifying to see my work… well, work.