A nice 2024 essay by Jim Nielsen about the process of “sanding” user interfaces he’s working on:

One of the ways I like to do development is to build something, click around a ton, make tweaks, click around more, more tweaks, more clicks, etc., until I finally consider it done.

The clicking around a ton is the important part. If it’s a page transition, that means going back and forth a ton. Click, back button. Click, right-click context menu, “Back”. Click, in-app navigation to go back (if there is one). Click, keyboard shortcut to go back. Over and over and over. You get the idea.

It’s kind of a QA tactic in a sense, just click around and try to break stuff. But I like to think of it as being more akin to woodworking. You have a plank of wood and you run it through the belt sander to get all the big, coarse stuff smoothed down. Then you pull out the hand sander, sand a spot, run your hand over it, feel for splinters, sand it some more, over and over until you’re satisfied with the result.

This is a clever metaphor and I wish I thought of this before. What follows is a specific story of finding a few dead pixels in between related interface elements, which is an absolutely perfect example of something with non-linear frustration: It might not register at all on the first try, but it will bother you 1,000-fold on the 20th go.

I was just on Internet Archive earlier today, uploading some documents I scanned this weekend. Their UI is… how would I put this… let’s just say Internet Archive makes Teams feel like Linear. (I love Internet Archive and their work and mission, but let’s be honest here.)

Yet, I found something marvelous. Whoever put the upload form UI together knew there will be people like me who’ll be filling out 20 of these forms one right after another. So they made sure every pixel in their form is clickable to edit the nearest field. And I mean, every pixel.

Whoever you are, you have my nod of recognition. In at least this one respect, it’s clear someone spent a lot of time with the sander.