In the context of hydraulics, “flushing” is the act of forcing a fluid through a system to clean it. It’s a common practice in the industry, and the app I’m working on implements this feature.

The challenge

We’re working on some improvements to our flushing system, and one of the challenges we’re trying to solve is representing the status of the process in the UI.

I’m prototyping some ideas, and one of them is showing the state in the same component that’s used to trigger the flushing. It could display a spinner when the flushing process is running, and some hints about how it works when you hover over it:

Make it stupid fun

If you ask me, there’s nothing better to drive innovation than two people challenging each other. Specially if they never use the expression “are you out of your f***ing mind?”.

So, I was talking to a friend about this, and he suggested that the button should make a flushing sound when you click it. I know a genius idea when I see one, so 2 minutes later I had this:

And this, my friends, is why I love my job.

🧡