On Thursday I threw out two redesigns in one afternoon. Then I figured out the problem was me.
Some background. I run sixteen local publications, and I run them from a tool we built ourselves called Atlas. Its front page had been bugging me. It was always out of date, and it never showed me a real schedule. So I did what anybody does with a room they're tired of. I asked for new paint.
Two coats
I build our software with an AI, so that's who I asked.
The first version came back looking like a newspaper. Cream background, dark type, serif headlines, one red. I looked at it and said, "I thought I was looking at the current page."
So it went the other way. Black background, one bright color, big numbers across the top, like a control room. This time I said more: "You're just putting new colors on what we have there. You're not even figuring out whether the UI even makes sense."
Read that second quote again, because I didn't. I was blaming the AI for not asking whether the screen made sense. I hadn't asked either. I'd asked for a look. I got a look. Twice.
So we counted
Atlas keeps a log of everything anyone changes in it. We stopped designing and read the log.
It wasn't kind. Atlas has 78 screens and about 35 things in the menu. In the last 60 days I'd made about 50 changes in it by hand. That's less than one a day. I hadn't touched the task list since August 4.
Here's what happened. When I designed Atlas, I pictured a newsroom. Editors, reporters, everybody with their own screens. I built for all of them. None of them exist. It's me, and I do most of my work by talking to an AI, not by clicking through menus.
I'd built 78 screens for people I never hired. New paint wasn't going to fix that.
The question nobody asked
What do I actually open this thing to do?
That's it. That's the question. Nobody asked it, including me, and when I finally did, the answer took four lines. In the morning I want to know:
- What came in overnight.
- What meetings and games are on today, and in which towns.
- Where every story stands, from half-written to ready to go.
- What we've published that nobody has posted about on social media yet.
We rebuilt the front page as those four things and pushed everything else down to a single line at the bottom. It went live the same day. The first time it loaded, it showed 17 items in overnight, three events, eight stories being written and ten ready.
And then the fourth box. It looks back three days, and it showed 28 published pieces with no social post behind any of them. We went looking for the last time any of our papers had posted anything. July 21.
The old front page never told me, because it was never built to.
What I got wrong
I'm not against a good-looking screen. I'll ask for a new look again, and probably soon.
But I had it backwards. I was asking how the thing should feel before I knew what it was for.
The part I keep thinking about is the AI. It did exactly what I told it, fast, two times, and both times it handed me a nice-looking version of the wrong thing. It could count the screens. It could read the log. It couldn't tell me what I want to know when I sit down in the morning. Only I knew that, and I'd never said it out loud, not even to myself.
People complain that the software they buy was designed for some bigger company the maker had in his head. Building your own doesn't spare you that.
I had one in my head too.