You’ve probably heard of the movie Limitless (2011) - IMDb. Well, this post focuses on the total opposite - being limited and doing so with intent. Crazy, right, in the world that focuses on maximizing profits, supersizing meals and the latest and greatest there is still value in limitations and holding yourself back. And let’s not get ourselves in the other side of the extremes, being limited is not minimalism. Being limited is being conscious about what can and needs to be done without overdoing it.

Whiteboard markers

My first conscious encounter with this concept of being limited by design was in brainstorming and ideation sessions. We were given post-it notes and whiteboard markers by the workshop facilitator. Clumsy thick things with sharp smell. My first reaction was of annoyance - how can I write and express my idea clearly - the paper is too small, all I’ll be able to fit will be just a couple of words. The group next to our table had someone get a pen out of their pocket and writing down in full their proposal. It wasn’t during this session where it clicked for me. I put 1 and 1 together only later, only when reading recommendations for how to design mobile applications (Windows Phone had just launched and as a developer with background in Microsoft related development tools I couldn’t just ignore it). The recommendations mentioned to use thick markers to focus on usability and not visuals - a knock with a sledgehammer for my own perception of things. Now the brainstorming sessions with the choices of stationary made sense - limited in space one had to optimize, review and iterate until the idea could be expressed in the clearest way possible - given name in just a few words. That’s how we got catchy names for initiatives. That’s how we got to memorable ideas. They had been pre-designed already before they were put to the post-it. Same with the screen designs, I had the opportunity to test the recommendation in practice when we were doing paper prototypes - people with sharp pencils and fine pens tended to clutter controls, add things that realistically wouldn’t work well with touch being the main form of interaction (we were a bunch of software developers used to doing information dense web applications). Giving them whiteboard markers removed discussion focus from details - buttons became squares without need to discuss and decide how they would be named, and complaints about not being able to draw everything that is needed became indicators that we are trying to do too much in one single space.

Boxes within boxes

Containers (not the kind we have in IT) serve a similar purpose physically limiting complexity and creating need to simplify. There is even a book targeting use of containers as means to limit clutter in our houses that I love: Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff: White, Dana K. The same is true with posters, birthday cards and PowerPoint slides. We are often guilty for producing information dense monstrosities (sometimes mockingly called one-sliders) that challenge readability to not sacrifice any of the wealth of facts and references that might exist. It’s a familiar feeling - having so much to say and so little space on the screen next to the graphic that we also wanted to show because it supports message/branding or provides motivation. In the end the constraints here similarly force to iterate and to distil a message that’s lean and to the point. Yes, it will not have all the details, but often time that’s not what the audience wants to see - they want something concreate and understandable, they can always request an excel or word document that has all the details and nuances.

You are here

I feel that this is even more important when it comes to drawing - there have been many meetings where people struggle to put in words how and where in a system there are issues, while others keep asking questions or staring to describe in turn what they had understood. A thousand words are easily said to be lost/misunderstood and forgotten. A well-drawn representation of a process or a system may easily save a week worth of manhours of discussion that can be replaced with pointing out the problem area - where audience has enough context from image to see and imagine dependencies and scale of things affected. Drawing grounds ideas to one representation, whiteboards are useful, PowerPoints with lines between named boxes are useful and in a pinch - MSPaint with mouse drawn squiggles is better than being misunderstood.

When ASAP is too fast

Your automation scripts can be performant enough to disrupt the system you are trying to interact with. Sometimes stress testing your application can have the side effect of crashing clients internal network where your development environment happens to run. In life however you don’t want maximized load on all systems - especially those that are error prone and especially if they involve feeble humans. In some teams senior developers complain about the amount of questions that they get from juniors. Bringing as evidence that the questions are so trivial and so many that they can’t get any of their work done. Before work from home it was not so simple to disconnect from your peers to get some work done. But then again it was possible to sacrifice the comfort of your desk and book a phone booth or a meeting room. It had a wonderful effect of letting seniors focus more on the firefighting they were doing and for juniors - having their problem solver disappear without clear indication when they would be back again and available - forced to spend more time looking for solutions. Timed delays before critical operations give opportunity to think what’s happening and are less prone to auto-confirming clicks on popups. Optimizing ingress of work just leads to queuing at the next bottleneck and systems that are operated by humans perform worse once stress induced by remaining work exceeds reasonable comfort. People may try harder to clean out last 2 tasks from their task list, but at 99+ tasks nobody will even want to open it.

Different thinking

Different ways of thinking are an usefull tool to keep in your toolbox. Limits are a thing of cultural significance in the western culture - something to overcome - we even have a book that records people who have pushed past them, Olympics celebrate world records of athletic performance and you have to be this tall to go on a ride in ferris wheel. Western culture prides itself in indivudualism and autonomy and thus seeks to overcome limitiations. Similarly there is a lot to learn from eastern influences - confucianism, taoism, buddhism seek balance with what is. There is harmony to be found by embracing limits. Feng Shui seeks to exist in harmony with natural forces (light, wind and water) rather than changing them and a similar mindset is needed when we do our work in software - our definitions of quality and precision are closely bound by limits. Maybe the cultural “hack” would be to call them guardrails, because we feel much more freedom and safety within space that’s guarded. I hope that knowing the intent of the limits you encounter will make it easier to appreciate them.