Nothing Should Move Under My Finger
I really want to do a complex transaction on my phone. It’s probably my fault that I have notifications coming in and out of my phone for no apparent reason.
Yet just under my finger a notification appears. Right where the selection button is for my item.
Instead of “order” I open the notification. This isn’t great.
The Most Annoying Feature In Software
We’ve put a man on the moon. We have AI writing software. We can translate languages in real time. We can identify diseases using machine learning (probably, nobody really beleives this).
Yet somehow we’ve still not solved the problem of keeping a button in the same place for five seconds.
I find this fascinating because the software industry is obsessed with difficult problems. Perhaps they should tackle the most important problems to solve for the user experience. Just a thought.
Enter AI
Every company on Earth appears to be having the same conversation.
“How can AI transform our business?”
It’s a reasonable question, but seems to constantly be generating the wrong solution to a problem we actually already know the answer to.
We know how to respect the user and their intentions. We can respect priority. We aren’t asking why we should do something rather than if we should do something.
AI is genuinely impressive, and I use it every day to go faster and “ship, ship, ship”.
The one that stole my tap.
The one that interrupted my task.
The one that existed because somebody thought that was acceptable.
Somewhere in Silicon Valley a team is building an AI capable of generating software from natural language.
Meanwhile another team in the same company can’t stop a notification appearing underneath my finger while I’m using their product.
One of these problems is considerably easier than the other.
AI Doesn’t Fix Bad Decisions
This is the thing people often misunderstand about technology.
Technology rarely fixes organizational problems.
If your priorities are wrong, better technology simply allows you to make mistakes faster.
If your incentives are wrong, AI helps you pursue the wrong incentives more efficiently.
If you don’t care about user experience, AI won’t suddenly make you care.
The software industry likes to believe that every problem can be solved with another layer of technology.
Sometimes the answer is simply to stop doing something stupid.
The Metric Nobody Measures
The reason this problem survives is because nobody measures it properly. Like many fault metrics it has unanticipated consequences.
So when:
The accidental click gets counted
The popup impression gets counted
The notification open gets counted
We need to remember that user frustration doesn’t get counted, and doesn’t get measured.
Well not until users stop trusting the product. Not until users get annoyed every-time they open an app, and then eventually won’t use it anymore.
Management loves the dash with increased engagement. They don’t know the opportunity cost of customers who couldn’t stand the changes, who couldn’t stand the poor production and who couldn’t stand the poor quality.
Management declared success at the dashboard.
Conclusion
Software developers love discussing architecture. The framework arguments.
We obsess over AI (without getting things done which needs to be done).
Meanwhile users are trying to press a button.
Maybe we should focus on helping them do that first.
Just a thought?
Nothing should move under the user’s finger.
Not an advert.
Not a popup.
Not a notification.
Nothing.
And if we can’t manage that, perhaps we’re not quite ready to let AI run everything else.
How about that?
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper and regularly publishes articles through Medium.com
The Secret Developer has accidentally opened enough notifications to qualify as an engagement metric that is on a Snowflake dashboard somewhere.