Pixel Perfect

UX design gone wrong

This is the second short story of Litverse’s Short Story Saturdays.
Read the equally incredible first story here.

It is an exploration of the need for optimization in images, interfaces, and user experience.

Rich sees her in the window across the street when she's contorted in complications: one foot anchored, one foot like a talon curling. After a few weeks of watching, he Googles the position and learns “Warrior Three.” After a few weeks, he learns how she dances in the morning in a gray t-shirt in the eat-in kitchen and how she eats dinner in front of her laptop on her gray couch and laughs with her shoulders at the TV. He learns how she swims out of cabs late on weekends in purple dresses and how, after getting home around six at night every weekday, she stands in front of the window looking out like from a raft on an open sea.

Rich does not learn her name, but he learns her schedule so he can make time for her in his. This is how:

7:02AM: Cracks two eggs in a bowl, grinds coffee beans while stirring a scramble on the pan. Drinks coffee, eats the scramble looking out the window.

7:11AM to 7:13AM: Watches her eat yogurt in the window across the street. Slings his leather laptop bag over his shoulder and leaves the apartment after watching how she stares at the ceiling like she does every morning before entering the world.

7:32AM: Climbs up stairs to the 7 train. Searches the tracks for her. Half the time, he catches her face and it feel like a rush of cool water before crushing into the hot mouth of the morning train.

8:24AM: Sees co-workers on Fifth Avenue, puts his foot on the hydrant at the corner to pretend to tie his shoe. In avoiding them, Rich feels effective, not embarrassed. He's done the calculations and knows that talking about the weather or sports can cost him the valuable minutes he needs to squirt six streaks of soap into his hands in the bathroom and rub his hands thirty-six times in the sink.

8:31AM: Gets an elevator after waiting out a group of sales guys in golf shirts, listening to the hearty stew of their chuckles carrying up through the hollows of the building. The security guard nods at Rich as always, with a look of sympathy reassuring in its regularity.

8:33AM: Rich, the junior graphic designer sings, How was your weekend/ Good, he says. You? Amy went to Brooklyn Mirage with her boyfriend and shows him a video on her phone where she screams “Wooooo!” as lights flash. The speaker crackles with a bass drop. More wooing follows.

8:48AM: Reads news stories that make him angry but assured in his silent opinions. Presses fingers to the icons of hearts and thumbs and envelopes when appropriate.

9AM: Opens design software. Dabs candy-pink gradient to the buttons of Pixel Perfect (patent pending), to make them shine as bright as a new revolution. As Pixel Perfect CEO Michael O'Hare declares, the Pixel Perfect Photo Optimization App is “a revolution in photography” and will make every moment look as good as possible and feel as real as truth. The AI-powered Pixel Perfection System, O'Hare often explains to investors and apathetic employees alike, offers a way to make memories look as good as they should. The secret is al Lin the Pixel Perfect Studio, which has what Rich believes to be the most beautiful user interface in the market. He feels a wave of pleasure beholding the orange sherbert of the main menu, the apricot edit buttons shining like sunsets, the midnight blue filter buttons as luscious and lickable as candy. The filters don't just make your photo look different, he has told CEO Michael O'Hare, they transform memories to art.

11:02AM: Drags the Edit button a few pixels to the right while listening to death metal before dragging it back to the left. Resizes the “Design” button. In the hours between hours, Rich generates galaxies from a vapid void. Thirty-two days since the woman moved in across the street, this is the only time he isn't thinking about her.

5:18PM: Rich leaves work twelve minutes earlier than usual to get home in time to watch when the woman gets home. She tosses her keys onto the kitchen counter and goes to the bathroom and walks out in spandex with a purple yoga mat under her arm. She shakes open the mat and falls to the floor in Downward Dog. Rich watches until he's in the apartment with her.

What's so funny? she calls, strained from a shift in position.

Just watching old episodes of our favorite show, he says from the kitchen mid-chuckle as he breaks stiff spaghetti into boiling water, It's amazing how real all this still is. You definitely couldn’t make this today. Should be ready in fifteen minutes, by the way.

They sit and eat at her kitchen counter. She looks up with a red fork to tell him the sauce is perfect. He flushes with wonder that the woman he met so long ago can still be so new.

I love you, he tells her. She watches the words with big brown eyes and

She is squinting at him from the window across the street. Rich trips over his couch trying to back away. She draws the blinds.

7:46PM: Rich sits at his laptop with espresso and opens a folder named PHOTOS to sift through six years of Marissa.

Year 1: Clicking their first year together, it's hard to feel time passed and he holds the hope he’s playing pretend and the reality rendered by love is irrevocable, irreversible. But he sees the date on the photo as obscure as a fossil. Marissa and he started dating seventeen years ago. But the pixels of the people in the photos were perfect. Wasn’t time just a number?Rich clicks pixels of people with the stillness of knowing what happens at the end but pretending at surprise. Year 2: A trip to Ireland, a bar wearing green. A platinum sky and rain on a bike ride in the country. God, she was beautiful. Year 3: The move from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The one-bedroom in downtown. The apartment they shared but where suddenly they never saw each other, only money. Year 4: The apartment above the taqueria. Local concerts on wood stages. Tattoos. The Golden Gate Bridge in fog, tumbled diamonds of midnight lights across the Castro, pink-red seashell homes the color of fruits on hills growing bright under low clouds. Her eyes shining with some lost light of past purity from the scalp of Bernal Heights in the straw-gold of sunset, the liquid gold of twilight like a tide washing the world. Year 5: Weight in her face. Big thighs from her shorts. Unflattering bikini pictures in Puerto Rico. Year 6: One photo out of 1,123 has Marissa in it. Most are landscapes in isolation across Denver and Houston and Norway and Hawaii, as if he went there by himself. The photo of her is from a weekend trip to Boston. She is in front of the Bunker Hill Monument and he looks happy with his arm around her waist but he knows he knew, wonders if the tourist they asked to take the picture saw souls or stagnation. The moments in his mind glide gold and cold through him as he stares at his frozen forgotten face from years ago.

Liar, Rich hisses. Liar!

He closes “PHOTOS” and looks out the window and knows she is watching TV, because blue and white flash behind the blinds.

3:36PM: Rich thumbs enough faces to match with a 34 year-old brunette named Isabel who is “fun, loves to travel and drink red wine and Zumba. Loves sports and my dog, always up for a new adventure.” On the subway, he flicks the six pictures submitted for inspection. Good cheekbones, a smile with white teeth. At Union Square, he climbs into the cold leafless spring.

Waiting outside the place, Isabel texts.

Past a dog run where Marissa and he used to dream about owning a beagle, through Madison Square Park to the thin tailbone of Broadway, the cocktail lounge’s neon sign flicks in the purple evening mist missing a letter. illuminating Good Lif in heartbeat red. A woman hunches over her phone with Isabel's likeness but she's heavier and shaped differently from the pixels of her photos. Rich feels no hate or pity or guilt as he heads back to the subway. He has done this six times in the past two months.

He complains to his friends on the way back to Queens: Another date who hid what she really looked like. Always wonder what they think will happen when I see them in real life Like most times, half of his friends don't respond and if the other half do, it's days later with a monosyllable message Rich glanced at like a week-old headline.

8:30AM: Rich. We need to talk, Michael O'Hare, CEO of Pixel Perfect, says with arms crossed when Rich steps out of the bathroom rubbing his freshly paper-toweled hands. He brings Rich into Park Place, the biggest of the Monopoly-themed conference rooms. Three senior sales managers are there. The junior graphic designer is there. The Chief Product Officer is there.

Rich, we love you, Michael O’Hare says, but we know how you work. So we thought this might be done better this way.

The screen in the conference room projects Pixel Perfect. Rich's user interface blooms like a flower and just seeing it makes him relax. This is his perfect world, a purity without purpose.

CEO Michael O’Hare asks the bald senior sales manager to give feedback first and the bald senior manager asks why the Design button is so big and tells the room how his guys get confused because they're not selling a design tool because Adobe already did the design tool to death and Pixel Perfect is selling an edit tool so shouldn't edit be bigger?

Yeah, adds a sales guy with a popped collar, we got to be super clear with our value prop. It’s basically filters. That’s what we do.

Pixel Perfect isn't filters, Rich says between his teeth, brittle with disbelief Our users can design their memories to be as good as they should be. That's how you use the most powerful capabilities of the program. Anything our users put in there, they control it all.

Sure, a sales guy with a fiery beard says but the clients are buying editing and then they think we compete with design tools and we get dinged on that.

The mission of Pixel Perfect is making every pixel perfect, Rich argues.

Let's take a step back and reimagine the platform, CEO Michael O’Hare says. He taps his laptop. The projection in the conference room of Rich's user interface is replaced by a clown show of color with buttons all the same size, icons that belong on street signs and angles like balloons deflating in mid-air.

Here's what may be Pixel Perfect two point oh, CEO Michael O’Hare says. It’s finally intuitive. Anyone can use it. The sales guys murmur in awe.

There is only one person who could have performed dentistry on his vision once given the codes of the colors he knew to be true. Seeing the elements of his user interface crafted so clumsy to fit convention, Rich goes cold at the familiarity of it all. The junior graphic designer won't look at him.

We're going to A/B test this new interface, the Chief Product Officer explains pressing her glasses to her nose. We'll track user behavior in each platform and see what engages clients better.

But now it looks like all the other design tools! Rich exclaims.

That’s better, says the sales director shaped like a bowling ball, my guys love it, it's simpler, they don't have to go searching for the buttons in the demos. Users are just trying to get stuff done. This makes sense.

Intuitive, CEO Michael O’Hare proclaims.

No, no, no, Rich says.

Rich, the Chief Product Officer says. Your pixels may be perfect to you. But you can't control how everyone else sees them. This is a good compromise.

A few people laugh when Rich storms out of the office.

11:12AM: Hopping down the steps from the subway, Rich’s mind is full of smoke. He escaped with his dignity, he tells himself as he walks down from then 7. The silver sun boils the air. Thinking of the new Pixel Perfect interface makes him swear. The buttons are wrong. The colors are wrong. The experience is wrong. Anything right in life has to be measured first. Anything right in life has to be measured to find meaning.

She would understand, he tells himself when he stops at the alley next to her building where the trashcans stand under a tired tree rattling in the breeze and looks up at the mellow sunlight coming from her window. A wet wind whispers through leaves, bending branches scraping the fence. He climbs the fence and climbs the fire escape ladder to her apartment.

The screen to the window pops and Rich is in the apartment in the living room. Her voice echoes between the now and the never and he imagines her between scene and sensation, lighting the dark living room with light in his mind.

Are you going to join me or just watch, she teases.

A rainbow of a million memories roars in waterfalls: Rich can't believe how lucky he is to have had her in his life at all, for all those years and he can't believe, can’t imagine performing the same miracle twice, until it happens

He hears her footsteps up the stairs. Keys rattle but he still see her in the couch.

Do you ever feel like this life we have together is the fantasy? he asks her when the for opens. Is the fantasy reality?

All the time, he thinks she says.

The police burst into the apartment screaming and aiming. A sweaty man with no chin and a well-gelled blond guy slam him to the wall and cuff him.

Nothing is ever perfect, he hears Marissa whisper. Because nothing ever lasts.

And inside the apartment the woman across the street, Rich is in the living room when she turns on the lights. She is with a handsome man with a black goatee rubbing her shoulders, saying sympathies, and even as she pointed in out to the police, Rich couldn’t help but think that existence to everyone else is optional until you built something that lasted. Like the Pixel Perfect User Interface. But no one thought that was perfect anymore. And if nothing could ever be perfect because nothing ever lasted, then what had Rich’s life been about?

Thanks for reading “Pixel Perfect.” Eventually, Litverse will package a bunch of these stories together and beg for money. Right now, I’m just grateful that some readers make it to the end. Still craving another Litverse short story? Check out Digitally Remastered Classics.