A case for slower software
Not slower to use. Slower to change. There is a quiet kind of quality that only shows up in tools which have been allowed to sit still.
Mara Ellison
Writer and design lead
I want to be careful here, because slow software usually means the wrong thing. Nobody is arguing for a spinner. Speed of use is close to sacred, and a tool that wastes a second of someone's attention every day has taken a week of their life over a decade.
What I mean is slower to change. Software that is permitted to be finished.
The cost of motion
Every release asks something of the person using it. Where did that button go. Why is this now three clicks. Which of my habits still works this morning. Individually these are trivial, and collectively they are the reason people describe perfectly capable tools as exhausting.
The teams making those releases rarely feel the cost, because they experience each change once, at the moment they build it. Users experience the accumulated total, all at once, every time they come back.
What stillness buys
- Depth. People only develop real fluency with a tool that stops moving long enough to be learned.
- Trust. A thing that behaves the same way on Tuesday as it did in March becomes something you stop thinking about, which is the highest compliment a tool can be paid.
- Better decisions. When shipping is not automatically a virtue, the argument for a change has to stand on its own.
How to slow down without stopping
The version of this I actually practise is not restraint for its own sake. It is a division: keep the surface still and let the inside move as much as it likes.
Performance work, reliability, security, the quiet removal of things nobody used. All of that can ship every day and nobody has to relearn a thing. Changes to the shape of the product, the vocabulary, the layout, the place where the important button lives, those get grouped, considered, and released rarely enough that a person can notice them.
Ask of every visible change: is this worth the cost of being new to somebody?
Often the answer is yes. Frequently it is no, and the change was really about the team needing to feel motion. That is a real need, and it deserves an honest name rather than a release.
The tools I love
Almost everything I use daily and would fight to keep has been essentially the same for years. A text editor. A camera. A note-taking app that has resisted every temptation to become a workspace. None of them are exciting. All of them are, at this point, load-bearing.
Written by
Mara Ellison
Writer and design lead
Mara has spent twelve years shaping products for small teams, mostly by asking slower questions than anyone wanted. She writes Fieldnotes on Sunday mornings, usually before the house wakes up.
