Why everything is so hard to use
Everything is a lot of things.
There’s never been so many things. Open the door and walk into a random American home; you’ll find 300,000 items. See that child, she has 238 toys. In a day, you’ll use thousands of services and thousands of products. Those products are made up of myriad components; 30,000 in a Toyota.
Each and every one of those components can break. Each can malfunction. Each can find itself thrown into a situation for which it was not intended.
Bad products
There are countless bad products. There are so many bad products, because there are so many products. There’s so many things - the bad ones stick out. We notice them; bad products linger, they cast a shadow.
Our simian brains are designed to keep us safe. They’re good at noticing things that fail. When we notice products that fail us, we lose trust in the good ones too.
When we use products we have expectations about how they’ll work. Bad products break these mental models. Not only for the bad products, but for the good products that follow. So, an experience with a poorly designed product degrades a subsequent experience with a good one.
So many people
There’s never been so many people using these things. Different types of people, from different types of places. Our mental models are not all shared. Some by fact of where we grew up and by being surrounded by ways of doing things. Some just because they’re different. If you’ve ever asked a group to follow instructions you’ll see how widely people interpret them. The same is true for software; the same is true for hardware. Early modern technologies had remarkably homogenous user groups. Products today are designed for and sold to much wider user groups. When mental models clash, products become hard to use.
For a brief time we lived in a Mass Media Age. Suddenly, globally everyone was in sync. We read the same news, listened to the Beatles and watched Snow White at the cinema. The Internet Age hurled us back to a fragmented world. A world comprising 100,000s micro-localities. Our products are designed to straddle these worlds and the mental models that accompany them. New mental models are introduced and must be learned. Chinese information architecture creeps in to our apps via TikTok, AliExpress and Wish.
That’s more to know and more mental models to master.
Rising standards
Technology’s onward march has gifted us wealth our cousins in The Middle Ages could never have imagined. We have the luxuries of Louis XIV without the fear of the guillotine. Yet, like Louis we’re impossible to please. Personalisation is the pinnacle of individualism and our insistent demands that the world shapes itself to us. We increasingly expect that technology satisfies desires we didn’t know we had. We lament the inconvenience of searching for things we will like.
We want things exactly as we like them.
We don’t want Coca-Cola, the democratiser of diabetes. We want Coca-Cola with our own names on it. Personalisation is barely born and it’s already gushing into the offline world. If our objects don’t know us, they’re hard to use.
We keep raising the bar. The treadmill can be traced back to the Romans, the hedonic treadmill goes back to the savannah. We’ve been spoilt with the best design from leading brands - Apple, Braun, Audi. The leading web technology with freakish employee-to-earnings ratios can afford to spend lavishly on designers who obsess over individual buttons. With world-class product design available to all of us, in digital and occasionally physical products, we quickly become accustomed to using the best. It should be seamless, it should be frictionless. Don’t make me think. We’ve raise the bar, and the rest of the world is broken.
Acceleration
There’s more of everything and its coming at us fast. Change - technological and social is accelerating. As software seeps into industries that remained still on the surface for 50 years. Replacement cycles are quickening, helped along by planned obsolescence. This demands fast design.
Fast design leads to rushed decisions.
Rushed decisions that allows bad design to creep into our houses and into our pockets. Rushed decisions that infuriate us on the subway or on the sofa.
Scale
We have more things. And so, we are exposed to a larger technology surface area. Changes in even a small fraction of the products we use, lead to massive numbers of changes in our daily lives. We can’t keep up.
Our brains are have hard limits.
There are finite numbers that evolved in our past - Dunbarr's number of 150 relationships, 25 regularly visited locations, working memory of 3-5 things. And all these numbers drop when we're stressed or when bombarded with sensory inputs. Each of these limits are saturated, or regularly saturated. Things become hard to use, when we can’t think clearly.
Modularisation
Modularisation made the modern world, it drove down costs and drove up quality. Modularisation spread to supply chains. Supply chains are global; our things assembled in a breadcrumb trail across the planet. With even the simplest products containing hundreds of components, assembled in a logistical dance across faceless factories in countless countries, it’s a miracle that things work at all. But work they do.
There’s a well known rule of thumb in engineering - things break at the boundary; where things interact. The number of interactions between components is a function of the square of the number of components. With hundreds or thousands of components, that's a lot of things that can go wrong, a lot of things that need to play nice together. When things go wrong, products become hard to use.
Move fast and break things
Software has redefined how products are developed. Software can be updated quickly, updated remotely. Products can be improved after they’re sold. This means things get shipped before they should.
Software sits on myriad devices. Devices that product testers never knew existed, let alone tested for. Working software gets updated that lead to breaking changes.
Busy, Busy, Busy
We’re busy as fuck. We’ve never had so little time to use our things. Everything's rushed. Nobody has time to stop and smell the roses. I can’t remember what roses smells like. It’s not something I have done. Without the time to use our things, we don’t have time to learn to use them. In the digital world, we use 66% of our apps less than once a month. That’s no time to build a relationship with a product, or to figure out how to operate it. Or to fix it. We are demanding. We expect convenience. If it doesn’t work immediately - it’s broken. We'll buy a new one, we’ll buy a better one.
Distracted
In our free time, we’re distracted. Podcasts and social media have snuck into our unused and under-used time. They’re there in the background; always on. We are in a constant state of multi-tasking. The 2 hours a day we spend on our phones; that’s empty space that was previously used by something else. Some of that something else was fixing things.
On demand
We’ve fallen out of love with things. Things have become burdensome. We want the experience, not the headache of ownership.
But that impermanent, renting mentality is a reinforcing cycle. The experience economy creates relationships with objects that are fleeting. Short interactions are unforgiving on learning curves. If we struggle to operate hotel showers, we’ll soon struggle with everything else.
Entropy
Everything falls apart. It’s etched into the universe via the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Admittedly, it’s not very legible and requires some mathematical knowledge to inspect; but there it is. The nature of the universe is a relentless trend towards is disorder. With so many things and our attention elsewhere, our stuff falls apart.
Broken things are hard to use.
Our relationship with our things is not the only thing that has changed. So too has our relationship with where we get them and who we get them from. The move to online business models has ushered in an age of faceless, frustrating customer support.
When things go wrong, we have no one to blame and no one to complain to.
Broken things stay broken.
We lament, we move on. Broken things are hard to use.