things

s18e02 · 12 March 2024

Everything is Better, Except...

This issue explores the paradox of modern convenience: while specific, optimized "happy paths" like grocery delivery or drive-up ordering have genuinely improved, any deviation from that narrow path becomes a nightmare of deliberately poor support and error-handling that leaves users responsible for fixing problems. The author argues that companies have intentionally deprioritized edge cases and customer service resolution to maximize profits, creating a false narrative of progress where the promise of easy service collapses the moment something goes wrong—whether that's a wrong item delivered, a disputed airline ticket, or navigating healthcare insurance obstacles.

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0.0 Context Setting

Tuesday, March 12, in Portland, Oregon where it is a grey day and my music playlist right now is a bunch of covers.

0.1 Hallway Track News

Hallway Track is on hiatus until mid-April while I get my programming and scheduling sorted out. Email me if you’ve got some ideas.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

One thing today that I thought would be short, but... you know the drill.

1.1 Everything is Better, Except...

As I was getting ready for the day this morning and doing the 21st century thing of being internet-present with my friends who’re also getting ready for the day (yeah fine, I did it mostly after I got my family ready), what caught my attention was how Things Are Getting Worse.

This isn’t going to be one of those Ugh, Things Are Getting Worse caught-my-attentions. There are enough of those.

But I did stop to think: well, sure, lots of things are getting worse -- otherwise enshittification wouldn’t have hit a zeitgeist -- but are there things that are getting better? There have to be some things that are getting better, otherwise what am I, some liminal (sic) GenX/millennial groucher in their 40s?

Fine, some things, seen in isolation, are better. I did not spend much time trying to think of them, but I did come up with:

  • There’s more of a chance I can eat outside!
  • I can get some (i.e. more than none) free pandemic tests mailed to me by a government!
  • If it’s hard for me to get around, I can get groceries and other staples delivered to me.
  • Ditto there are more places where I place drive-up orders.

I am sure there are more things. I take it as both a combination of shitty socio-economic-environmental factors and mental health that it is harder to think of more quickly and on demand.

But this is where I bring it back to being shitty! And also where I bring it back to conversations I’ve had with friends and peers in gestures uh, “design” and “internet” and “online”.

Happy paths have been super, super optimized. Good job everyone, line go up and to the right! When everything lines up, that path is super frictionless, whether that path is leading you to spending more (inevitably) and coincidentally ends up with meeting your needs (occasionally, say).

Excellent job on your “I want these specific groceries delivered at this specific location, time and this date” and those specific groceries do indeed turn up at that specific location, time, and date.

But I think two things have also happened:

  • Edge cases have exploded
  • Edge case exception handling remains (intentionally?) unoptimized and deprioritized

(There’s an exception to this, which is probably the ease with which Amazon lets you, in the U.S. at least, deal with a return, all the way through to “just take it to any number of places to drop off, and in many cases, you don’t even need to bother with re-packaging).

I have a suspicion that this explosion of edge cases / exception handling / error handling, combined with how terrible it is to remedy those cases, is a large part of what’s making things hard and worse right now. Another way of putting this is that even more support is being outsourced to the user and, well, commitment to resolution is just being more and more deprioritized. All of this, in the end, in the service of making more money, saving money, or Doing More with Less.

There’s a clear tension between these two states:

a) being able to tell a story like “this thing is easier now than ever before”, which is true, because that very specific thing is, probably, easier than it has even been before;

b) but if you deviate from the path for that thing, then no, now you’re trapped in the Scylla and Charybdis User Experience -- the promise of something good, but the rock of “haha no it’s going to be like crawling over glass to get it for you”.

For those in the U.S., nowhere has this been more obvious in the case of the healthcare industrial complex. I am sure that healthcare insurers tout access to care and the optimal, ideal path of a patient seeking treatment and then getting it Much Faster and at Much Better Quality than Competing Insurers (and let’s be clear: they don’t compete).

More obstacles to that happy path (sic)[1] than before. I could improvise a dozen ways to frame those obstacles (Providing Better Value for Money, Focusing on Outcomes, Being Responsible for Members’ Funds) and the thing is, none of those are wrong, but they’re also, well... weaponized? Used disingenuously, too?

I will go back to the grocery example. There may be times when you need a specific thing, like a really specific thing, and then you check that that thing is in stock, and then you do an order because this time it really is worth it in terms of logistics to you to get the thing delivered and let’s set aside the guilt of being so irresponsible with the climate as to get them delivered through some sort of emissions-producing vehicle, and then the thing turns up and it is not the thing.

Then now you have to go through a dance of achieving your remedy, which is what, exactly? In this particular case, there is no time to go get the thing. You’ll just have to substitute and deal, and I suppose that’s where your flexible and resilient ability to tolerate and adapt to change thanks to your mental health comes in, so good job on that! And otherwise, sure, get a refund. How easy is that going to be this time?

How easy is that AirBnB refund going to be this time? How easy is that air ticket refund going to be this time? And oh my god how middle class insufferable are all of these examples?

The other observation here is that the attempted optimization and improvement of customer service channels frequently fails to provide for, at the earliest or lowest tiers of support, the ability to remedy or to ask: what would make this right and the ability to follow through on that. Like, a good twenty years ago or whatever, we’d (me: debatable) would be sitting around gushing about Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness, about the Zappo’s obsession with, well, it’s in the title. (The Zappos story did not... have a fairy tale ending, but what does, these days)

Now customer happiness - surprise and delight - I don’t think lies in resolution of problems. Here’s another out-loud example: if you’re a designer and you’re working with Surprise and Delight or Understanding and Meeting User Needs and you want a Seat at the Table, then what’s the deal with support? What happens when Meeting the User Need is providing restitution and remedy? Where the fuck are designers at the table when Roku pops up an unskippable modal requiring you to agree to terms of service and that the opt-out is to send a letter, in the mail, to a physical address? I wrote about this YEARS ago.

See, it turns out that your design is constrained by the business model. You really want to go to town, want a seat at the table? Go to town on the business, or work to change how the business works. At the end of the day, that Roku example is that you (we?) put “design” (intentionally?) in a box as a tool and methodology(thanks, IDEO?) when if you’re designing how something works then you realize designing a manual opt-out was also a choice. And that was a business decision.

I am getting tired that everything inescapably comes down to be strait-jacketed by money. But it was ever thus, it’s just the nature and visibility of the strait-jacket changes over time.

2.0 The Pulling the Cord alpha

As of writing, there are 6 places left for the Pulling the Cord alpha, a one-hour talk teaching you everything I know about convincing leadership to switch from a traditional, waterfall-style (agilefall, really) approach to technology procurement and development, to delivering user centered, agile services.

This is for you if you’re on the verge, or near the verge, of making what feels like a Big Mistake, and you need help preventing it.

I’ll be sharing:

  • recognizing and understanding the position of decision-makers in control functions, like central IT and finance;
  • how to use no-blame language and acknowledge the present situation;
  • help decision-makers understand what’s needed to be successful and the decision they need to make;
  • and more.

The Pulling the Cord alpha is on Wednesday, March 20, at 11am PT / 2pm ET, and at a ~90% testing discount while I gather feedback.

One hour, you get a recording, and you get a copy of the deck.

If that’s not you, please pass it on to someone who might find it useful!

OK, that’s it for today. I need to get back to, uh, responding to this RFP about um improving procurement.

How are you doing? Are you also exhausted?

Best,

Dan

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  1. I really dislike the term Happy Path and if you know a better one because I seem to have forgotten all the alternatives, I welcome the reminder ↩︎