Podipo Blog Four Pixels

"Four pixels to the left", said the designer, pointing at a button on my monitor. I was a new engineer and the lead designer was sitting next to me to fix the visual design problems that inevitably pop up in a new site. We were two hours in and this felt like the 100th tiny tweak that the designer asked me to make. Why did those four pixels matter? What did she see that I didn't? This is a common frustration for engineers. After driving the development effort forward, sometimes late into the night, the movement of a button four pixels seems irrelevant, especially compared with the unending number of unimplemented features and unaddressed bugs that every V1 effort contains...