Bill W:
Chad G:
#9 of 10 in a series: Why Obvious App Improvements Don’t Get Made
Story Idea #082 – Users compensating for deficiencies
Users are remarkably good at making bad systems work.
That may be part of the problem.
This story asks whether successful workarounds can actually hide a product defect from the company responsible for it. People create spreadsheets, memorized tap sequences, browser tricks, third-party utilities, handwritten notes, Bluetooth remotes and countless other adaptations. The task eventually gets completed, so the company’s metrics may show success.
But the user supplied part of the missing product design.
Gig work is full of examples worth investigating. Drivers use external mileage trackers, helper apps, screenshots, custom mounts, saved messages and personal routines to compensate for information or controls the official apps do not provide conveniently.
We want documented software research and case studies on this phenomenon. Do product teams sometimes underestimate a problem because experienced users have learned to route around it? Are new users more revealing because they have not yet learned the workaround? Can high task-completion rates conceal significant hidden labour?
There is also a fairness question. A workaround transfers effort from the software maker to the user. One workaround may take seconds. Repeated hundreds of times, across thousands of users, the aggregate cost can become enormous while remaining invisible on the company’s balance sheet.
The article will also look at how good product research identifies these adaptations—especially by watching people work rather than merely asking whether they completed the task.
A system that users have learned to survive is not necessarily a system that works well.
Sometimes the clearest evidence of a missing feature is the elaborate little ecosystem people have built because the feature is missing.
