Day 2

Like many other programmers out there, I’m guilty of being pretty lazy. Programmers tend to embody a special kind of lazy spirit that paradoxically fuels their own efficiency. Why write the same code over and over when you can make a function instead?

When it comes to design, though, that same laziness quickly starts to work against me. Laziness and design don’t pair very well at all, and lazy design is bad design. Here, my tendency to throw stuff together quickly is a hazard, carrying risk of creating all kinds of problems (ranging from accessibility to things being just downright awkward).

So as I start working on the new Neatnik Accounts thing, I have to tell myself to be cautious and caring about the work itself. I really want to get this right the first time (though there’s certainly value in approaches that encourage fast failure or iterative improvement).

The best designers begin their work with paper and pencil, but I’ve just never been able to do that. I always begin in a code editor—a pretty bad habit, honestly, but that’s me. I was always the kid in school who didn’t understand why we had to write a first and second draft of our papers before turning in a final draft; I just wrote the final thing and didn’t want to be bothered by the overhead of the process.

But, it turns out, there is a special beauty in the process itself. And for this work, right now, I’m going to indulge in the process more than I’ve let myself do in a while. I’m not going to be reaching for paper or pencil, but I’ll begin this work with some thought instead of code.

There are a ton of design decisions that need to be made, and half of the battle is just identifying all of those decisions in the first place. So far, here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Usernames. Should they be email addresses, or something else?
• Passwords. Should any minimum standards be enforced? I usually don’t like that when I encounter it in the wild (i.e. “your password must be n characters long and include x special characters”), but is it irresponsible of me to let someone use the word “password” as their password?
• Login screen. I think there’s an art to making a simple, accessible, frictionless login screen... and I want the one I make to be the very best possible.
• Forgotten password workflow. It’s bad enough when you forget your password, but it’s so much worse when the process to reset it is cumbersome or annoying.
• Passkey management. I’ve had this outsourced to Passage all along, but now I’ll need to think about how to handle it nicely.
• Account creation. How will new accounts be created, and how will people know that they have a “Neatnik Account” when they sign up for some totally different thing? How will I convey this so that it’s not confusing or intimidating?

And that’s just scratching the surface; there are so many other things to consider. But taking some time to think through some of these more significant aspects of the account experience should help me get off to a solid start.

And speaking of starting, I’ll probably find myself in that code editor tonight! And will hopefully have something to show for it sooner than later. Stay tuned!

See you on Day 3,

— Adam