If any part of your plan involves the words ānobody could be that stupidā, please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a momentās 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.
āit will be fine if people justā
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 Donāt, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward āwill people actually do thisā?
Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70ās.) 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 thereās a lot of social pressure to do it ā but the social pressure wouldnāt exist if it wasnāt easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didnāt 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 donāt 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 itās environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And donāt guilt people about not doing it until itās as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like āwouldnāt it be cool ifā. Itās not the fault of the individual that they canāt get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.
if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is āyouāre holding it wrongā, the next question you should ask is āwhy did i make this tool so itās easy to hold it wrong?ā
Thatās the problem with making animal proof trash cans for parks. The animals tend to be far more motivated to open the difficult mechanism than the tourists do.
