Interfaces Without Users
Most of the software running today was never meant to be seen. Notes on designing for an audience of other machines.
The average interface now has a readership of one program and, if something goes wrong, one tired engineer at 2 a.m. Everyone else in the chain is a machine that will never notice whether the labels are kind.
And yet the good ones are still legible — not to be nice, but because legibility is what lets a human step in without dread when the automated version finally breaks. Designing for machines is still designing for the night someone has to read it by hand.
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