Ask the “dumb” questions

When I was working at SideDoor, we received a couple of bug reports that the images were blurry. With enough support requests coming through, I made sure to keep an eye out in production for any weird-looking images.

We used ImageKit, a service that allowed us to optimize our images at runtime, but we didn't really use srcset to show a blurred low-res image while the higher resolution image was processing.

I worked with our head of customer support and had a quick call with one of our customers to ask the "dumb" question. "When you say the images are blurry, what do you mean by blurry?"

After the call, I learned quite a bit about their process. Interior designers, when working with their clients, create a mood board and show different furniture options. During the curation process, they painstakingly go through each product to save the images. Since the images are taken from the product cards, when scaled up, would understandably look pixelated.

Of course, we know that we optimize these images by scaling them to the size of the container so pages would load faster.

After that we shipped a feature that allowed our customers to download all of the images in their collections in HD. A lot of laborious work, gone.

A simple question allowed us to understand a lot more about the domain of our customers.