waving android

I am currently a software engineer at Google, where as a member of the Android platform team I build frameworks and user interfaces.

The blog here at is mostly historical; you can find more recent posts on .

Making Things Easy Is Hard

April 1st, 2004



Daring Fireball is at it again
with Spray-On
Usability
. (In response to ESR’s CUPS
Horror
. Compare Why Free Software
usability tends to suck
, mentioned here a while ago.)

UI development is the hard part. And it’s not the last step,
it’s the
first step. In my estimation, the difference between:

  • software that performs function X; and
  • software that performs function X, with an intuitive
    well-designed user interface

isn’t just a little bit of extra work. It’s not even twice the
work. It’s an entire order of magnitude more work. Developing
software with a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work.
Raymond acknowledges neither.

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