The Inmates are STILL Running the Asylum

There was a time not too long ago when I thought corporate UX maturity had finally come of age. While still not perfect, many products and services had noticeably improved their user experience and were undergoing continuous improvement with each iteration. Companies from startups to global enterprises were forming in-house UX teams and aggressively hiring UX professionals. UX consultancies were thriving. New UX books were coming out every few months, and UX conferences were well-attended.

But then the pandemic hit. My wife, a kindergarten teacher, was suddenly forced to leave her classroom behind and conduct her classes online using the new education technology platform the district had adopted. I was working from home as well and, as the designated household technology “expert,” I was called into service every time the ed-tech product required my wife to do things she didn’t know how to do and know things she didn’t already know.

The user experience of this product was atrocious. I can usually figure things out, but not with this technology. There were actually invisible white spaces on the product’s home page that you had to click to complete some tasks. The labeling made no sense. The information architecture was a maze of unnavigable menus and screens.

My wife’s frustration with the product—and mine—boiled over every day for months. We blamed each other for our struggles when it was really the product that was to blame.

In an attempt at emotional therapy, I pulled out some of my favorite UX books from early in my career. One was Alan Cooper’s 1999 book called The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.

The book’s dust jacket perfectly captured my sentiments at the time:

“Our lives are becoming evermore centered around the whims, quips, decisions, and disasters of the high-tech industry. And these hardware, software, and technology developers don’t think like us. Despite appearances, business executives are simply not the ones in control of the high-tech world—it is the engineers who are running the show. We have let the inmates run the asylum.”

Then I re-read Donald Norman’s 1988 classic The Design of Everyday Things, and underscored this passage:

“Between us and our machines, we could accomplish anything. People are good at the creative side and at interpreting ambiguous situations. Machines are good at precise and reliable operation. Unfortunately, this is not the approach engineers have followed in reacting to advances in technology. Instead, they’ve adopted a machine-centered view of life: machines have certain needs, humans are adaptable. Give the machines priority, technologists’ thinking goes, and tailor human operations to fulfill the requirements of machines.”

Now, despite Cooper’s asylum analogy, I don’t think engineers are insane. Nor do I believe that today’s engineers are insensitive to the human experience of technology. No one on the product team is intentionally trying to frustrate us. However, complexity is real—whether we’re trying to use technology, obtain a service, conform to policies, or adhere to proscribed procedures—and it’s a major impediment to the health, well-being, and productivity of human beings.

The UX Professional's Superpower

The reason why technology, services, policies, and procedures are often so complex is because the unique superpower of UX professionals is often discounted, deprioritized, and ignored. What is our superpower?

UX professionals see problems that no one else can see.

Why is our superpower discounted, deprioritized, and ignored?

Because if our colleagues can’t see the problem, they won’t believe there’s something wrong that needs to be solved.

This is the biggest challenge UX professionals face in their jobs. It’s not just a big challenge; it’s an enormous, humongous, prodigious (insert your favorite adjective here) challenge. It’s so big that it’s often insurmountable unless you know how to navigate corporate politics to get around, over, under, or through it. It’s the reason why technology continues to be obtuse, services continue to be frustrating, and policies and procedures continue to be unnecessarily complex.

A couple of small cases in point.

Case Study #1:

I bought a “smart” washer and dryer. I paid $50 extra to add an AI capability that was supposed to allow my washer and dryer to talk to each other and decide the best way to wash and dry my clothes. Sounds great. I have better things to do. I don’t want to be a laundry expert.

But when I registered my washer and dryer and attempted to update my user profile on the company’s website, I saw this:

What is an SNS login connection? Why should I care? And what can I do about it if I did care? Clearly, SNS is common knowledge at this appliance manufacturer and in their view I, their customer, should already understand what SNS is. If I don’t understand it, it is my responsibility to look it up and add the term to my personal knowledge base.

Case Study #2:

I log in to my financial institution. I’ve set up two-factor identification for security purposes. After I enter my username and password, I see:

Hmmm. What is SMS? Do I have that?

If I’m not a technophile, would this confuse me, make me pause for at least a few seconds? Of course it would. Why is it important that I know the acronym for the underlying technology’s communication protocol? Why not use a word that I and everyone else understands? Why not just say "Text"? I don’t "SMS" my friends and family; I "text" them.

Are these incredibly simple examples? Yes, and that’s my point. They should be simple. But the blindness of engineers bleeds through from the technology layer to the human experience layer, making these products and services unnecessarily complex. How does this happen? Because the engineers and presumably the rest of the product and leadership teams don’t see the problem. They assume everyone thinks like they do, knows what they know. And if the uninformed user doesn’t understand something, they can look it up.

Using common language in these products—eliminating the requirement that users of laundry machines and banking websites understand the meaning of irrelevant terminologies like SNS and SMS—IS NOT DUMBING DOWN THE PRODUCT!!! It is simplifying it. It is making it relevant and understandable. Because unlike them, not everyone wants to be a "superuser" of the company's technology or an expert in your product domain.

But these two little case studies are just the tip of the iceberg. Many more serious lapses in simplicity pervade the technologies, services, policies, and procedures that we use on a regular basis…

…Lapses in simplicity that degrade our health and well being as did my wife’s incomprehensible education technology software.

…Lapses in simplicity that can be traced back to a single root cause:

Only people with the rare UX mindset can see the problem.