Motivations:Work Outside The Box

As a Web developer, you have to constantly summon creativity and empathize with users. If you have a natural flare for design and usability, that’s great. But our work can sometimes become inflexible and boring. We can lose our enthusiasm to try new things. To avoid this trap, we can strive to gain new insight by putting our common tools aside and exploring projects beyond the Web developer’s usual environment.
Experimenting with new ways of creating applications and interfaces and even building a hardware controller will lend fresh insight into our own field and make us see the techniques we use day after day with new eyes.
It is also a good way to become more sensitive to usability issues. If you work all day at the computer, you probably cannot understand how a technically inexperienced 85-year-old person feels when they visit your website for the first time. You can’t because your experience with using a keyboard and mouse is so natural.
The best way to get that feeling back — to feel what it’s like to have to click and play around with an interface to figure out how to use it — is to build your own hardware controller or a new kind of interface. Being the one who has to fix these fundamental problems will make you much better at identifying what elements make for a comfortable interface.