My take on "There's an app for that": build vs use

Morning: daily routine

Background music: T-Pain - 5 O'Clock ft. Wiz Khalifa, Lily Allen

• I wake up to an alarm.
• Start the day by putting some toast on, checking email on my phone, and all that morning stuff.
• After I'm done with the usual (eating, mostly), I call an Uber to work.
• My Uber is here.
• But I need my coffee first thing in the morning. Well, OK, maybe second. Or fifth, if you're counting.
• I don't feel like waiting in a long queue, and I can't start the day without a 12oz cappuccino running through my blood.
• Good thing there are apps like Hey You and Skip (again, not sponsored). They let me skip the queue and order while I'm still in the Uber. Ten out of ten for the sleek interface, by the way.

The ride: this bloke has Spotify on his speaker, and not even premium

Background music: Rather Be - Pentatonix (Clean Bandit cover)

• There's music playing in the background of the Uber.
• Guess what? The driver is playing it through Spotify.
• How do I know? Because of a certain ad about really, really wanting to hear a certain song.
• If you didn't get that reference, I feel an immeasurable amount of happiness for you, mate. Either you pay for Spotify Premium or you're not using Spotify in Australia.
• The Uber driver turns and gives me the awkwarrrrrrd smile.
• I pretend nothing happened by infinite-scrolling between my apps. That's my solution for getting out of an awkward situation.

Work: fast forward through the usual UX stuff

Background music: Ugly Baby - Stephen Lynch

I do all my UX stuff. I won't say much about this part since my whole website is about UX, but it involves my journal, Sketch, InVision and a whiteboard.

Evening: don't believe me, just watch

Background music: Bo Burnham - God's Perspective

• It's nearly the end of the day and this band thing on my wrist tells me I haven't covered much distance.
• My good mate the watch: seriously, you should see how skinny I am. You'd stop sending me these notifications.
• You'd tell me to stay home, order pizza online (and by the way there's a plugin that tries every gift coupon code for you, it's called Honey) and gain some weight.

Despite the unintended promotion of all these apps, I was just trying to show how my everyday life revolves around them, and yes, there really is an app for everything. If your argument is "but Sagun, there isn't an app that can toast bread for you" then, my friend, that's what toasters are for. But everything you interact with from the moment you get out of bed to the end of the day has an app built for it. If you can't find one, you've just found your user gap, a billion dollar idea. Exploit it. I love this concept: you want to do something, and there's a good chance an app or plugin has been designed to do it.

The same applies to UX, and to UI design specifically, when it comes to build versus use. Every time someone asks my opinion on whether to design something or use an existing app or service, my answer is "it depends". It's up to you. Personally I work through a set of questions: do I trust this plugin or app? Do I want something light, or am I fine with a plugin taking care of my site? Will using a plugin solve my problem with less effort while keeping things stable? How long will it take to load content from that API? Or do I only design my own when I can't find anything flexible enough?

Being a security practitioner, my spidey senses are always tingling, and that's where I think twice about the "there's an app for that" principle. Say I'm designing a WordPress-based ecommerce site. I have top-notch security and everything is updated, but what about the third-party plugin I'm using to make images pop up? Is that equally secure? It's probably built by someone in their bedroom in Nepal. (Not an insult, it's my hometown.) Do I trust the plugin and let go of the paranoia, or do I say "screw that, I'm building my own"?

Another thing to weigh up is who else is already using it. Are the early adopters trustworthy? Can we trust these apps with our users' data? I'm not a big fan of solving problems with plugins alone, but I still use the questions above to decide. I'd trust Amazon Web Services to host my web apps, but I wouldn't trust Uncle Sam's XYZ web services. Credibility and recognition affect the temptation too. I'd happily use the Bootstrap grid system or PayPal's payment gateway APIs, because they're already built, built well, and half the industry already trusts them; there's no way I'd do half as good a job. These apps and plugins exist to make life easier, so why not make the most of them?