Title: The Edges
Context: It’s all fun and games until your user experience runs into someone else’s user experience.
Synopsis: You spend months crafting your product’s user experience. You consider every detail. Sweat over each pixel. Obsess over all of the many workflows. It is perfect. Then your customers deploy your bulletproof design in their environments and the vitriol comes flowing in. Things are breaking. Features fail. Users are wondering what the hell could you people have been thinking. What happened? Well, your customers are promiscuous to be frank. Your worldview is consistent and polished and considered. Theirs is a hodgepodge of systems, products, and environments. They don’t care how you designed the thing, they only care about how it works for them, in their domain, with their tools. Didn’t take that into account? Why the hell not? It’s probably not possible to consider every potential environmental variant that could degrade the user experience you designed, but throwing your hands up in the air and saying “it’s not our fault” isn’t going to fly either. We are all in this together, and it’s high time we started acting like it.
Best Bit: “The people who create these systems are not — usually not — incompetent, nor evil.”
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