On Sunday I put together one of those desks you can raise or lower. It was not an Ikea product, but as an expert Ikea furniture putter-together, I have learned to cherish such processes.

And to value the design. Design as in the shape of it but even more so, how the product has been designed from an engineering perspective.

As I work my way through the manual, lay out the components before me, I am envisioning the production line that makes the product. And with every component I assemble, my respect grows.

For the designers that have meticulously drawn out every angle, the engineering firms that have produced the machines that create the components, for the huge infrastructure of engineering firms that make possible the production of this humble desk.

We are a small software company that builds custom software solutions. But some of our clients consistently misunderstand what the word “custom” means. They think of software as a big ticket item like a car. Yes, a car is a product, but not a “custom” product. Look at an automotive website and you will see that colour, upholstery and wheels are the best they can do.

The production line is the best comparison one can find when seeking to explain what custom software is.

Think about it.

Think of the design and production process, the marketing and delivery of the desk. All for someone to experience it in their home. Building a web application goes through similar steps of design, production, marketing and delivery, to the end of providing a person an experience. A user experience.

Think of a production line. Of the machinery that bends metal, saws wood, drills holes, the paint shop for the nice finish. There will be machines that perform completely autonomously, others that need their buttons pushed, their sliders slid, their controllers controlled.

Then off they go, our experiences. Nicely packaged. Marketing sells them as a lifestyle choice, as a tool to solve specific problems, generates requests for them, trucks go out to respond like the web server responds to user requests. Shipped to your door: you assemble it yourself.

The user experience production line of a web application runs every time a user opens a page. Everything has to be just right. All screws must be present, every hole exactly the correct diameter, the panels the exact dimensions. If not, the user experience will suffer, text will be too big or too small, images won’t load, or worse, the website will crash.

Consumers tend to have a superficial take on the world of products. They press a button, the TV turns on, if not, they ring support.

Software and hardware builders are engineers at heart. They see the world of products as intricately assembled potential experiences made possible by a huge infrastructure of engineering companies.

Of which my humble raising desk is one. Assembly went well, by the way, just one “bug”. And my partner loves it.