Quality Is the Most Important Metric

Harper’s Chrome ex­ten­sion con­tin­ues to come along beau­ti­fully. I’m ac­tively work­ing to make it more use­ful and re­spon­sive, slow­ing crush­ing bugs that I hear about from our users and con­trib­u­tors. I will not go over them here, since our closed pull re­quests should speak for them­selves. I would, how­ever, like to rapid-fire some of the small im­prove­ments and ideas about Quality that I’ve been brew­ing up this week.

Quality

I first heard about big-Q Quality from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. The book’s length—whose main sub­ject is the idea of Quality—speaks to its com­plex­ity as a topic. It’s a great read, and I’d highly rec­om­mend it.

One im­por­tant point the au­thor makes is that Quality is in­her­ently a hu­man idea. It is hard, if not im­pos­si­ble, to de­fine al­go­rith­mi­cally or on pa­per. When one in­ter­acts with an ob­ject or a sys­tem, they come away with a sense of its Quality, with­out nec­es­sar­ily know­ing ex­actly what led to that sense.

Some ar­gue that in to­day’s world of LLMs and fast-it­er­a­tions, the real value of a good soft­ware en­gi­neer de­rives from their sense of Quality. We know whether a de­sign de­ci­sion or change to the code is worth ex­plor­ing. We know how it will af­fect users. I don’t think this ar­gu­ment is rel­e­vant to the LLM dis­cus­sion at all, but I do agree with it in spirit.

The Most Important UI Element

Harper’s Chrome ex­ten­sion has one crit­i­cal UI el­e­ment that user’s should be in­ter­act­ing with more than any other: the sug­ges­tion box.

Before	After

When Harper lo­cates a prob­lem in a user’s text, it un­der­lines it and waits for them to no­tice. When they do, they have the op­tion to click it and re­view Harper’s sug­ges­tion. This is a flow typ­i­cal of most spell and gram­mar-check­ing pro­grams, so you’re likely fa­mil­iar with it. This process makes the con­tents and be­hav­ior of the sug­ges­tion box ex­tremely im­por­tant for user sat­is­fac­tion.

After re­ceiv­ing some feed­back re­lated to the sug­ges­tion box’s vi­sual un­pleas­ant­ness and dif­fi­culty to un­der­stand in­tu­itively, I’ve started mak­ing some mod­i­fi­ca­tions. Nothing dras­tic—I don’t want to con­fuse ex­ist­ing users. I’ve fo­cused on mak­ing it more com­pact and use more vi­sual sto­ry­telling. Now, when a spelling mis­take should be cor­rected, it shows an icon rather than a full “Add to dic­tio­nary” la­bel. I’m al­ready get­ting pos­i­tive feed­back about the changes.

All-in, it seems like much of the de­sign phi­los­o­phy of the UI is be­ing pushed fur­ther in the di­rec­tion of Harper’s core tenet: to get out of the way.

Why Quality is Important

Quality is im­por­tant for the Chrome ex­ten­sion (more so than other in­te­gra­tions) be­cause of the Chrome Web Store’s front page.

Extensions that get fea­tured on the front page get a sig­nif­i­cant amount of free ad­ver­tis­ing. Millions of users view this page monthly. Getting on the page is guar­an­tee of tens of thou­sands of new users, if not more.

Here’s the rub: you can’t get on the front page by pay­ing for it or by chance. An ex­ten­sion is placed on the front page if and only if it meets a high bar of value and qual­ity. In other words: you have to earn it. This is the es­sen­tial rea­son why I’ve been work­ing so hard on Quality these past few weeks: I’m try­ing to get on the front page.

Most of the steps I’ve taken in this di­rec­tion are small enough to not be worth men­tion­ing here. If you’re cu­ri­ous, feel free to reach out!