If any part of your plan involves the words ânobody could be that stupidâ, please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a momentâs notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.
âit will be fine if people justâ
people will not just
In 2011 I attended an event called Bmore Fail, in which entrepreneurs in Baltimore talked about their failures and what they learned from them.
What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Donât, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward âwill people actually do thisâ?
Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70âs.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and thereâs a lot of social pressure to do it â but the social pressure wouldnât exist if it wasnât easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didnât recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you donât recycle.
Your job as the system creator is to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, and as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. This is why web forms have data validation (but too much data validation actually makes the forms harder, so hit the spot in the middle.) And if you want people to adopt social change, whether itâs environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And donât guilt people about not doing it until itâs as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like âwouldnât it be cool ifâ. Itâs not the fault of the individual that they canât get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.
if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is âyouâre holding it wrongâ, the next question you should ask is âwhy did i make this tool so itâs easy to hold it wrong?â
