She didn't hesitate when she slid into the booth. That part looked easy, natural. But before the drinks even came she said it straight:
“I hesitated about this meeting. I wasn't sure if I should come.”
I nodded.
“Sorry about the divy-bar scene. It was the closest one on the way home.”
The way I said home carried no weight, no anchor. I was a workaholic; where I ended up after hours rarely mattered, and my wife was used to it.
I flipped open my laptop, screen glow cutting through the bar's dim. She folded her hands on the table.
“You don't stop, do you?”
“Not really,” I laughed. “I figured if you're going to learn this, might as well start right away.” She looked at me without saying a word and, for the first time, I felt like maybe she wasn't interested in getting it, just the paycheck. Was I wasting her time?
“Let's start with the basics. Good interfaces are forgiving. Users should feel in control. Undoing something should always be possible. The work is saved for them, continuously. The system does the hard part, the user just… settles in and gets the job done.”
She tilted her head, listening. No objection, no questions. Not a care.
The bartender brought our drinks, condensation dripping down the glasses. She raised her brows at mine.
“Whiskey sour? You still drink those?”
She smirked, leaned over, and stole a sip. The reaction was instant — a scrunched face, half-grin, half-grimace.
“God, it's as bad as I remember. How did I ever let you talk me into these?”
I chuckled, pulling it back. “That's the thing — good interfaces don't punish you for trying. You sample, decide it's not for you, and nothing's lost. Undo is built in. And there's no real deleting anything.”
I tapped her glass. “The system — in this case, me and the bartender — saves your progress. All you have to do is keep going. Back and forth.”
I waved the bartender over with a flick of my hand — G&T. Her smile lingered as the fresh glass appeared in front of her. She lifted it, clinked mine.
“You always did make it sound simple.”
There was a pause — a long, comfortable one, layered with five years of not talking. I thought about the time we met. Me and my wife, her and her husband. We found ourselves in San Diego and I was looking for an illustrator. One thing led to another and here we were. The boss and the employee.
“OK, so about your drink, right, here's the thing — the visuals are just as important as the mechanics. You test the look the same way you test the workflow. People judge by what they see first. If it looks wrong, they don't even give the function a chance.”
She pulled her gin and tonic closer, half-pretending like she was inspecting it for visual appeal, then taking a large sip, putting it down and looking at me restlessly. I continued.
“Another one. You never make people leave the screen to get what they need. That's like ordering nachos and being told to walk back into the kitchen for the salsa. You anticipate what the person wants, you bring it to them where they are.”
Her lips parted a little, like she wanted to say something, but she didn't.
I leaned forward. “The system belongs to the user, not the other way around. But autonomy doesn't mean anarchy. Users need rails. They'll learn faster when they're in charge, but they also need boundaries so they feel safe.”
She nodded, slowly.
At this point I was starting to get tired of talking. She'd been quiet through it, head bent over her glass, tracing the rim with one fingertip.
I leaned back and exhaled.
“You wanna write these down or something”
Her shoulders trembled before the words even came. Then, suddenly, her eyes filled.
“Hey, what's up?”
“Tell me, are you happy? How were these five years?”
The question caught me off guard. I blinked, trying to decide if she meant here in the bar, in my job, or in the larger sense I'd been avoiding for years.
“I don't know. I stay busy, I keep moving, it pays the bills, you know.”
She nodded slowly, her voice breaking.
“Because when I stop and I look around… home just doesn't feel like a happy place. Like
it should. It doesn't feel full of opportunity. I feel stuck, finished somehow, like there's nothing
waiting for me there. And I hate that. I hate admitting it.”
She dabbed at her cheek with a napkin, embarrassed but unwilling to hide it.
I let the words hang for a second, then exhaled.
“You know what that fucking sounds like? An interface that hides complexity just to look clean.
At first it feels simple, even elegant. But after a while, it's just empty. Nothing to discover,
nothing to grow into. It pretends to be freedom, but really, it's a dead end.”
She gave a wet laugh through her tears, shaking her head.
“Fuck you. Only you would compare my life to a boring app.”
We both laughed then, the tension broke. She wiped her eyes with a napkin, and when she looked back at me, something shifted — softer, warmer.
“But… I remember that. You know, I used Tinder for the first time yesterday.”
“WHAT.”
“Shut up. Listen. Isn't that why you brought us here?” She looked pissed off and like she didn't care. “I used an app that made me feel alive, where every interaction led somewhere.”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table.
“You're on Tinder?”
“Yeah, I signed up yesterday.”
“Wow.. So.. how did you feel using it?”
“Like my life was open, not closed off.”
“Exactly. You didn't need to know what was behind every door. Just knowing there were doors at all — that was enough. That's what makes you keep going.”
She nodded, holding my gaze now. The conversation wasn't about design anymore. It was about where she wanted it to go.
“You know.. I mean, we're not talking about interfaces anymore, not really, but there's a lot of similarities here. I think when there are too many doors you may feel trapped. The freedom of choice isn't freeing at all”.
The nachos arrived. I broke off a chip, let it hover over the salsa while I kept going.
“Autonomy shouldn't mean anarchy. We all need guidance. We ground our experiences in what occurred before. It's been studied — freedom without limits doesn't feel like freedom.”
She traced the rim of her glass looking guilty, as if I were judging her.
“Okay, this is going to sound like I planned this, but I just thought of this one: let users make their own choices, even inefficient ones. It makes them feel in charge. But you don't hand them a rope and look away. Delete an entire account? That has to be locked down. It's responsibility. You can't hand people tools sharp enough to cut their own throats without warning. And status — you've got to keep users informed. No blank silence, no sudden freezes. If the system is thinking, tell them. If it's waiting, show them why. Otherwise it feels like being forgotten.”
“Listen, Em, are you unhappy at home?”
“You know, when I was in school, they taught us color theory. My professor said — use it, but never rely on it alone. Give people secondary cues, because not everyone sees the same way. You don't want to make half your users blind by design. And that's how I feel about my marriage. Sure, he's nice, but he's not you, he's not even the guy who brought us drinks. He's so mono.”
The laptop, the principles, the whole little classroom I'd set up in the corner of a dive bar — it wasn't the point for her. The teaching was the excuse. The nachos, the laptops, the metaphors — just set dressing. I closed the laptop.
“You really did hesitate about coming here, didn't you?”
“Yeah. But I thought… maybe it's time to move forward in life.”
The noise of the bar pressed in. I felt the weight of the words in ways no heuristic could measure.