Weight Loss and UX

Roughly year ago I decided to change my diet after realising my weight had gone close to 90kg. Which was almost 20kg more that what I weighted in army 12 years ago.

But this wasn’t actually first time my weight had gone this high. Same had happened gradually before the army. I managed to drop it though in 6 months from 90kg to 69kg just before I went to army. I didn’t add any exercise to my daily life, instead I switched to Montignac Method.

Now 12 years later, I decided to take the same approach, as it worked before. Difference being that this time I would stick to it rest of my life. It’s been now, as I mentioned, roughly a year since I changed my diet. I’ve lost 15kg and my weight has been pretty much the same (around 75kg) for past 4-5 months. And I’m satisfied with this weight.

Nevertheless, weight loss is still rather big. It was interesting though how a colleague of mine hadn’t noticed the loss, until I mentioned it to him. Mainly because we work together on daily basis. Then again people I see rarely did notice it more easily. Or at least commented about it.

How weight loss is related to UX?

I was involved with testing of a e-commerce solution for past couple of years. In the early days of it, the usability of it wasn’t that great. Then again we were more than busy with testing integrations, performance and for example core functionalities of the solution.

There’s just that when time goes on, it’s easy to get to a point where you are ignoring all those little usability issues. You say to yourself:

It’s just one small issue. It’s not a big deal.

But. When you add a lot of nothing, you get something.

After a year a tester joined our team. And she was a type of tester who wouldn’t tolerate poor usability. One issue after another she started reporting and raising up those issues she observed. We let her do it and little by little developers fixed those issues.

Then one day, after a release, I realised that the usability of our product had went from poor to good enough. One bug at a time our new tester had got us to improve the product. And the improvement was certainly something. Instead of nothing.

This reminded me of my weight loss. It was difficult to notice the weight loss for people who were working daily with me. But on longer time scale, the difference was evident.

It also had lesson for me.

If you want to see a change, start now

All that time we were avoiding bringing up those little usability issues (of course a lot of issues missed also because it’s a skill of its own to recognise usability issues) because they were so small compared to many others. But in many cases, major changes come from several small accumulated changes.

Same applies to a diet and weight loss. Through numerous little daily decisions you can get significant results in long term.

It just requires discipline, knowledge on what to focus on and willingness to start now.