Where Did I Put That Intent?

Intent can be a slippery thing. In broader society, you have phrases like “intentional living.” When you practice intentional living, you attempt to treat every action as deliberate rather than habitual or accidental, with a consideration about the place and consequences of those actions in their context. Clarity of intention is also frequently associated with minimalist approaches. It takes more discipline and effort to practice it than is immediately obvious.

Software requires the same attentiveness. Having worked on a number of projects and products with human safety implications, I have become sensitive to the consequences of the code I write. These consequences extend to all software to some degree. The e-mail program that delivers mail to the wrong recipient can violate confidentiality and breach trust, sometimes with significant financial or political implications. The annoying crash of a word processor may seem trivial, particularly if no data is lost, but if you multiply it across millions of occurrences, it turns into a large quantity of irritation and lost productivity.

Minimalism also applies in software. The less code you write, the less you have to maintain. The less you maintain, the less you have to understand. The less you have to understand, the less chance of making a mistake. Less code leads to fewer bugs.

I deliberately include factors beyond safety, money, and productivity. Increasingly, software is integrated into everything and into devices that are with us much of our waking lives. This ubiquity gives software steadily increasing influence on the quality of our lives and our state of mind. Above, I included impacts like “trust” and “irritation.” The intent of our products includes nonfunctional aspects. The companies with the greatest success capture not just the minds of their users, but also their hearts.²

2. If you really want to dive into this topic, consider About Face by Alan Cooper (Wiley, 1995) and its successors.