Last weekend, I was in line at the mall, about to order some food in the food court, when a promotion caught my eye:
I groan at this deal because now I have a decision to make. Do I...
1) Take time to get out of line, find the app on the App Store to download and install it, navigate to the section that allows me to get the 10% off... And THEN get back in line? Or...
2) Do nothing. Just pay the normal price.
Basically, this wasn’t just “a deal”. This was an offer. And that offer was:
Would you be up to spending time downloading software (that also takes up space on your phone) in exchange for a discount right now?
(If you remember from my “💎IRREPLACEABLE💎” book, point #3 of my “value formula” is relevant here. “What you gain from the transaction must be more than the pain of implementing it”. Or in other words: Gains > Pains. Downloading a random app is a pain. So they give me a gain (a discount) to counterbalance it. Otherwise, NOBODY would download their crummy app)
I sighed and thought... fine, it’s worth it. This place was a bit on the expensive side, and a nice discount would be nice. So I bit the bullet, stepped out of line, and told Bekka to find a table for us, while I searched for the app.
Waiting for the app to download wasn’t fun.
Fiddling through crummy menus to select the restaurant I was at and trying to find the coupon wasn’t fun.
Seeing how many people went in line in front of me while I pulled up the coupon definitely wasn’t fun.
So by the time I actually got to the cashier to order my food, I was already a bit ticked off. All because I had to handle some dumb software that made my life a little bit worse at that moment.
(To be clear, I chose to do this. I was probably more angry at myself than the app, lol)
But in that moment, I thought how dumb the app was. Why didn’t it show me the first thing I probably was most interested in at that time (the coupon)? Why did it take so long to install?
And that’s what reminded me of an important “law of software” I don’t see many engineers talk enough about... probably because it’s more of a UX principle for designers. But we design software! So we should know about it. The law I’m talking about states that:
We shouldn’t forget that software is a delivery mechanism (in the vast majority of cases). Our job, when done to the highest caliber of quality, should make our work invisible. I click a button promising me x, and then I get x. I shouldn’t have to think much about the mechanics behind how the button works, or care about it. That’s not valuable for me as a user. I’m not even thinking about it.
I mean, think about how content and videos are delivered on the web:
YouTube: People want access to content and its creators. They don’t want to fiddle around with settings or deal with videos not loading.
Most websites: They are mainly created to feature content or allow people access to content. Or to produce a specific action (like sending in a form).
Social media: Eww
To play devil’s advocate for myself, a good counterexample might be something like video games... although even that can be debatable, since in that case the software itself is what people want. You use tech to deliver the fun tech to the user.
But at the end of the day, it’s usually all about value. And I told y’all in step #1 of Irreplaceable how important it is to understand. I consider it the hardest thing to fully learn as an effective (big moolah-makin’) engineer.
Which is why I will continuously keep telling you to think about it and re-read my section on it in the free book 💎Irreplaceable💎 you have access to (at least, if you are a subscriber to Exceptional Frontend)
Mauro Accorinti
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