We put up with things from our tools that we'd never accept from a person. What if you evaluated them like a member of your team?
We put up with things from our tools that we'd never accept from a person.
Picture a coworker who asks you for the same information three times in the same day. Who takes ten minutes to answer a simple question. Who misplaces an important document about once a week, and leaves it up to you to check whether they did their job right.
Sooner or later, you'd go have a talk with them.
And yet, that's exactly what a lot of digital tools put us through every day. And we say nothing. We sigh, we wait for it to load, we type the information in one more time, and we move on.
Where does all that patience come from?
Part of the answer is habit. Many of us remember the early days of the internet, when you had to wait several long seconds for a page to show up. We learned very early that digital meant slow and temperamental, and that you just had to live with it.
The other part is that we often see our tools as something fixed. A bit like the weather: it does what it does, and we work around it. The question "could this be simpler?" rarely comes up on its own. We tell ourselves it's complicated because what we do is complicated, and that's the end of it.
The result is that people adapt to the tool, when it should be the other way around.
We often look in the wrong place
When an error slips into an order or a piece of information gets lost between two departments, the first reflex is to look for who made the mistake.
In design, there's a very simple principle that shifts the perspective: humans will make mistakes. It's a certainty, not a flaw. Someone gets interrupted in the middle of a task, forgets a step, enters a number in the wrong field. It happens to everyone, every day.
A good tool starts from that principle. It saves you from entering the same thing in several places. It warns you when something looks off. It makes errors hard to make, and easy to fix when they happen anyway.
In other words, when the same error keeps coming back, it's rarely about the person. It's often a sign that the tool could be doing more for your team.
The cost nobody sees
The problem with patience is that it hides what things really cost.
A few minutes looking for a file, a piece of information to copy over, one more check because nobody trusts the data. On their own, they're nothing. Added up, across a whole team, over a year, they become time nobody spends on what really matters.
And then there's the cost that's harder to measure: the mental load of having to keep everything in your head, the new hire who takes weeks to figure out how everything works, the small morning frustration of opening your tool already knowing it's going to be a pain.
What if you evaluated your tools like a member of your team?
The shift starts with a simple question. If this tool were a person, what would you think of it?
Does it save you time, or does it take time from you? Does it give you the information you need, when you need it, or is it always up to you to go find it? Does it understand how your team works, or did your team have to learn to work the way it does?
These questions don't ask you to change everything tomorrow morning. They just ask you to raise your expectations a little. A tool your team uses several times a day is part of their quality of life at work. It's normal to want it to live up to that.
You have every right to hold your tools to the same standards as your team. And often, that's the first step toward a tool that truly works for you.
If this topic speaks to you, we dig deeper into it in the latest episode of Code 18. The link is right here.
-ÈL
