Hardly anyone will admit to self-sabotage, even if you confront them with blatant evidence. People believe they must suffer a bit in life, and to support that belief, a person can confabulate a whole series of complex reasons.
I think Mr. Rogers first indoctrinated me. Be patient now, save your allowance, put in a little work cleaning up your room, in other words, suffer, and later you will get some kind of payoff. He was trying to instill a work ethic in our millions of wee minds. What can I say. In our culture we learn from the T.V.
Later in life we discover other reasons to suffer, such as to avoid creating more suffering for yourself or someone else. We take an insult to avoid an argument. We let someone cut us off on the highway without honking. We get Zen.
When technology causes us to suffer we often treat it like that idiot motorist. Sometimes it only mucks things up enough to annoy us. Lots of people think they are being smart if they adapt to system muck-ups and soldier on. In reality, they’ve just built suffering into their lives for no good reason. Worse, these FUBAR systems become the norm and actually get supported.
For example, I commute by bicycle, and the device that holds the lock on my bike is broken. I tried to fix it one day, got about halfway through the repair, was interrupted, and never finished. I satisficed by finding a way to attach the lock to the rack when riding. I tried to fix it again the other day but it lasted about one ride. The clattering as I go over bumps is normal to me now and I wonder what’s up if I don’t hear it. I’ve been doing this for months. Why won’t I take 15 minutes to go buy a new part? Instead, I’ve instilled in myself a habit of fastening the lock to the rack, and I’ve gotten used to the wrong way.
Users do this with systems. One might argue that they are forced to do so. After all, they have work to get done. I recently heard a user complain not four feet away from me (to another user), “My computer hasn’t been backed up for a month.” Rather than simply turn to me and ask if I can do something about it (after all, I am the one running backups), they utilize the moment to complain about technology and share an eye-roll.
I have seen documentation written by users that mentions workarounds for bugs no one ever reported. Now why would you write five paragraphs to explain a workaround when you could report the bug in an email and get it fixed? Maybe that person was trying to look smart. Not sure. The best case is that they just don’t think it’s important and don’t want to bother me. They were actually writing documentation, which is in and of itself a miracle.
In life, people tend NOT to complain right away, but they’ll quickly vote with their feet. If your sandwich shop is the only one on the block and does an okay job on most sandwiches, you’ll probably survive. But woe unto you when competition shows up.
Users behave in a similar manner with system features that don’t work for them. They just stop using the ‘feature,’ or never use it, and they never tell you. You only discover the feature has failed long after its failure is a fait accompli. How can one prevent this from happening? If a feature is going to fail, is there really anything you can do to stop it? Not necessarily. But the sooner you find out it’s a failure and why, the sooner you can learn from your mistake.
So… Get feedback early and often. Encourage users to write internal documentation. Put all your documentation into a wiki that the users can edit and you can see. Track and read the edits. If you don’t have such wikis, and there’s no chance of getting them started, ask department heads to get their internal documentation to you.
All I’m saying is if you just suffer a bit upfront by putting in this extra work, things will be oh so wonderful down the line. Heard that one before?
