Verb Noun Enter

The other day, I had a moment that reminded me why I love UI design.

I was editing some metadata in Apple Music on my Mac: things like fixing the artist and composer, and the punctuation, like replacing straight quotes with curly quotes, and triple periods with proper ellipses. I appreciate those details.

In short, Apple Music is unusably glitchy. I was fighting a new bug almost every five seconds. Apple should be ashamed of this level of carelessness.

So I switched to Meta, which is a third-party metadata editor that I’d previously picked out and bought, but still hadn’t explored completely.

Meta is “Mac-like”. It uses mostly system UI elements, and it follows Mac design conventions. I immediately started working more efficiently in Meta than I could in Apple Music.

But then, Meta gave me two a-ha moments that made my day.

First, Apple Music only lets you edit one song’s title at a time, so I’d gotten used to editing punctuation being tedious.

But Meta has this big content area that looks like the Finder’s list view, so I started to wonder, maybe I can use find-and-replace here, like I can in a text document.

So I typed ⌘F, and Meta showed me a find-and-replace bar. Yes, the standard one that you’d get in a text document.

And then I fixed every ellipsis with one click. That would have taken me forever in Apple Music, and Meta let me do it in fifteen seconds.

Second, even though I was editing metadata, Meta doesn’t automatically change each file name to match the song title, unlike Apple Music. So I started to worry that I’d have to do it all manually. Meta has a “Rename Files” button, but I thought, it’ll probably show me some crazy-complicated dialog that I won’t want to figure out how to use.

But I clicked it anyway, and Meta showed me this:

Whoa, this looks simple. I’ve seen all these controls before, so I kind of know what they’ll do. And it’s nice enough to show me a preview of what it’ll do, before it actually does it.

And with a few simple clicks, I told Meta to include the disc and track number and song title in each file name, with the exact punctuation I wanted. It even gave me the option to turn off leading zeroes in numbers, which I prefer not having, because it’s more human—we say “this is the 5th song”, not “this is the 05th song”, and the Finder correctly sorts numbers without leading zeroes.

Boom. Now all my songs looked nice and neat, and I added them to my Music library.

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I don’t know how well I can communicate this feeling, but I’ll be damned if I don’t try.

Just now, this UI let me fly.

I was worried that the tasks I wanted to do would be tedious or complicated. Why? Because they were generalized. I wanted to do the same things to multiple songs, without having to do them one song at a time.

It’s relatively easy to design a UI that lets you handle one item at a time, but then that’s not much better than dealing with physical objects. Applying rules to lots of data at once is what the power of computers is all about.

But powerful UIs tend to be complicated, so we usually have to choose between doing things the manual way, which is slow and tedious, or the complicated way, which is hard to learn. It’s hard to design a UI that’s both powerful and simple.

But Meta’s UI is exactly that. Since it follows standard Mac conventions, like ⌘F and the find-and-replace bar, I was already familiar with it. That’s the “consistency between apps” that old-school Mac fans like me rave about.

It also just designed with good taste. It only provides functions that are actually useful, and it makes them easy to understand.

All that let me figure out how to do powerful things in almost no time, with almost no cognitive load.

Do you know how it feels when you realize that a UI is well-designed? It’s chilling.

You feel a deep sense of respect, because you can tell that the designer cared so much about you. They wanted you to be able to use this, not just rocket scientists. They wanted you to have this power.

And then you feel empowered. Your fear vanishes, and you actually want to go explore what the rest of the app can do, because now you know that it’s a thoughtful, intentionally crafted environment.

Yes, even I, a computer nerd, felt worried using a UI I’d never used before. This is important. Great design doesn’t just help “novice users”. Being a nerd doesn’t save you from having to figure out complex UIs. It doesn’t save you from worrying about messing things up. Everyone who uses a UI has to learn how to use it their first time. Making a UI easy to use benefits everyone.

Some designers might be thinking other things at this point: “Isn’t it better to not have to edit metadata in the first place? Isn’t it better to hide file names and other things users shouldn’t have to care about in the first place?” Well sure, maybe if you could hide all those things completely, and make the software manage them all automatically, perfectly.

But the better point is, we all need powerful tools sometimes, and we always will. Not just for work; for leisure, too. So a great UI doesn’t try (and usually fail) to dumb down your tasks so that you don’t need power. A great UI lets you do powerful things with reasonable complexity.

Some people say that computers are bicycles for the mind. That’s pretty good, but not great. You still have to learn to ride a bike, and that involves falling off and skinning your wrists. And bicycles aren’t so fast.

Great UIs turn computers into magic carpets for the mind. Great UIs let you do things that amaze even yourself, yet also require almost no learning to use. UI design is about enabling the human mind to fly—and that’s why I care.