The essential tool with which to build things is your mind. Using and strengthening it hurts as much as using and strengthening other parts of your body. And as you progress, the stretching pain of improvement will stay. Listening costs nerves. Thinking is painful. Using your imagination is walking backwards into a dark and darker tunnel. The ease of following protocol comes with the disappointment of running in circles. The bittersweet pain of progress comes hand in hand with the heartache of making mistakes.

Building structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become.

Oliver Reichenstein.