Optimizing for humans

In recent years, we have seen the rise of the term UX, which stands for user experience. At its core, UX is about usability—understanding the user and crafting interactions and interfaces to be more intuitive or more natural for them to use.

UX typically refers to customers, which makes sense—that is, after all, where the money is. However, we programmers are missing out on something rather significant. Let me ask you, who are the users of the code you write? Not the customers that use the software itself. The users of the code are your colleagues and the future version of you. Would you like to make their life easier? Put in a different way, would you rather spend your future trying to figure out the purpose of a piece of code or extending the system? That is where the money is. As programmers, we get paid to deliver features rather than beautiful code, and code with good UX enables the faster delivery of features, and with less risk.