When I think about my career and my interests, this phrase keeps coming back to my mind, and I’ve also made it the title of this blog.

But what do I mean by “beautiful interfaces” in the first place?  I think it can be summed up in 3 points.

1. Beautiful interfaces contain nothing unnecessary. A beautiful interface has no extraneous elements, nothing in it that detracts from a complete, coherent experience.  This doesn’t mean that there can’t be design elements, but it does mean that the design elements cannot be merely unthinking decoration.  Every part must contribute to the whole.  In otherwords, beautiful != mindlessly pretty.
2. Beautiful interfaces contain everything that is necessary. On the inverse of the above, a beautiful interface contains everything that the user really needs, gathered in one place and presented in an understandable, accessible manner.  Thought is put into creating flow and connecting disparate elements as necessary; the goal is to create an untroubled, uninterrupted experience for the user.  The goal is for the interface to “disappear” completely, because it works so well that it requires no thought.
3. Beautiful interfaces are backed by beautiful code. It may be possible to have a beautiful, effective interface that is created with terrible code, but I have to imagine that this is a fluke when it occurs.  Crappy code (both client-side and server-side) makes an interface slow, brittle, and inflexible.  It builds you into corners, so that you can’t respond to the client’s real needs, or to changing technical conditions that arise.  And I have seen first hand how crappy legacy code tends to hijack the concerns of the entire design and development team, such that everyone spends most of their time coddling the crappy code instead of refining the experience and improving the design (both of the UI and of the code).

I’m not saying anything new with all of this, I’m well aware.  And these are all aspirational points to me; I definitely don’t have any of this mastered.  I’m just an interested beginner who’s really into this stuff.

Life is too short to deal with ugly, tedious, argumentative interfaces.  Why shouldn’t the everyday things that we use be beautiful?