Stop the beeping

Via Vitamin, I just read a very good blog post by Matt Mullenweg about the beeping in his house. He came back from a trip to find an irritating beep every minute or so, but didn't fix it for days. The gist of the post is about how engineer-types are able to block out irritating noises or problems after a short period of getting used to them. Matt put up with a smoke alarm going off every minute for three days, happily getting on with his work and simply taking calls in another room, before finally getting that new 9-volt battery. He ends his post by suggesting everyone go and check through their blogs/web apps/whatever and find the 'beeps', then concentrate on them and get them fixed. The point here is that we tend to start blocking out small irritations along the way when developing code (in order to concentrate on the important stuff) to the point where we've forgotten they were problems in the first place. That's obviously not good for your finished product, so going back through and re-finding all the beeping noises will allow you to properly polish your system. We've all seen these kinds of little irritations in either our own apps or others' (e.g. flickr's previous lack of a page to just find the newest comments on your posts) and Matt's post provides a great analogy and reminder to get them sorted and improve user experience.