In September 1999, Amazon got a US patent for letting people buy something with a single click. A year later, Apple licensed it for its own online store.
That’s how much one click was worth to the people selling things on the internet.
Most of us who build tools for people at work don’t think about clicks that way. We think about how the screen looks, and the people paying for our choices one click at a time are usually too polite to send us the bill.
A clean screen is always the better design.
I believe that one more than most people. My taste today is usually minimal, down to owning three or four pairs of shoes, so when a control isn’t used often my instinct is to tuck it away and keep the page calm.
So when we shipped new filters on the orders table in the product I work on, with a more compact layout people can customize, the checkboxes to select orders were hidden behind a Select button. You click once to see them, and then you pick.
On a screen someone uses all day, every control I hide is a click they pay for.
Twelve minutes
I posted the release in our Slack team channel at 2:32. At 2:44, a director who works in that table all day asked if the checkboxes could just be there by default, because the old view always had select all on screen and ours added one click. The message came with an apology and an offer to let me tell him to kick rocks.
That part stayed with me. The person who’d pay for that click every time felt he had to apologize for mentioning it.
My first idea was a compromise: turn the Select button into Select All, so one click selects everything and you uncheck what you don’t want. He didn’t want the button at all. He wanted the checkboxes to always be there, the way they already are in another table in the same product. Our product owner agreed we had some horizontal space, and at 2:55 he said he’d open a ticket.
Twenty-three minutes from release to ticket.
I wrote back that I actually prefer the opposite, but since they’re the heavy users, it made sense to keep it one click away. Then our product owner said it better than I could: our users lean very maximalist, and “they want all of the buttons everywhere”. My answer was that my preference isn’t always what’s best for the company, and that this felt like building software for the New York Stock Exchange.
I’ve started calling this the click tax: whoever needs a hidden control pays a click for it, and the ones who need it most are the people who live in that screen.
So build whatever the heavy users ask for.
No. Two people in a Slack thread aren’t all of our users, even when they’re the ones closest to them. What tipped it wasn’t the thread, but it was who was in it: the person who hears from the accounts all day, asking for the click back twelve minutes after release, before any customer had the chance. When the complaint arrives faster than the customers, the question is already answered.
Amazon got a patent for saving people one click. The person who answers for our customers all day apologized for asking for theirs.
One commit a week. Pass it on.
What AI did, what I did
Claude turned the notes I wrote after that thread into a first draft, found the Amazon patent and checked the dates against the sources.
It couldn’t tell me whether my taste should lose this one. That came from twelve minutes of Slack.
What I checked myself: the timestamps and who said what, straight from the thread. Every minute in this post is the real one.
From my week
I published the story of my first computer this week: a Pentium III that a nonprofit in my hometown lent to families who couldn’t buy one, and the paper I signed promising to give it back. Writing it in English, for people who weren’t there, felt stranger than I expected.
Keep committing,
Eder