Are you optimising for your own convenience?
Are you optimising for your own convenience?
It's easy to unwittingly bias our choices towards our own convenience. It may be easier to do something one way but at the detriment to the intended outcome.
When there are inadequate feedback loops it’s easy to make choices which are weighted towards the convenience of your team over the quality of the effect you achieve for your intended beneficiaries.
For example, to provide an intuitive user experience you might be better taking a longer path to a solution. But the pressures of other priorities may make shorter path options, maybe ones which compromise the user experience, still seem appealing.
The problem lies in what signals the team is using for their decisions-making. The apparent consequences of other priorities seem immediate and substantive. The effects of their decisions on users are unrepresented and manifest over a different timescale.
This might be a small thing if it were an isolated incident but its alarmingly common for supposedly service-oriented teams to lack any immediate feedback mechanism.
As such, these teams may make these poor trade-offs over and over. It grows like a compounding interest rate. The users they serve become more and more disillusioned as the appearance is that they simply do not care about the experience of using the services they are providing.
By the time such teams realise the degree of discontent among the users it is rarely an inciting incident to address the gulf of feedback but rather a fall into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The users lose trust that improvements are made in their best interest because the experience gets steadily worse.
The service teams don’t understand why users are growing irate and they start to resent the users’ apparent entitlement. A common pattern seems to be to double-down on choices which they feel will make the operation even more efficient but with known compromises to the user experience:
“We are doing this for their benefit, we can serve them faster!”
Even well intended efforts to actually improve the situation are now mistrusted by users and they are reluctant to support or participate. A gulf has formed.
For some ideas on what can be done to balance the decisions that are made we can use ideas such as extending the shadow of the future:
We can also ensure we have regular signals which represent all the aspects of success that are important for fulfilling the purpose of our area of responsibility. Part of your success is ensuring the experience of your services not only fulfil their functional purpose. To be used they also must satisfy a range of qualitative expectations of your users. The better this is addressed; the more likely users will use the service rather than work around it. The more likely they will engage with you when you need their help to guide the next successful improvement.
And, finally, we can be acutely aware that optimising for our own convenience is a very human nature which we must proactively counteract.
Do you have examples of these trade-offs? Share your examples in the comments.