Experience Engineering
And I don’t mean Imagineering. And I don’t mean user experience design. Today I have given a name to a practice which is much more widely practiced than anyone would prefer to admit. It is experience engineering. I defined it quickly in this tweet as:
The numbers are all wrong, the math makes no sense, and the user is happy with their experience.
Naturally there is the well known start-up credo of “just get it done.” The practice of designing or engineering a system with known flaws, because it can be implemented quickly, and with the express intention of returning (one day) and redoing it correctly. Of course, oftentimes that day never comes, and good intentions are free.
But I’m talking about designing a system with known flaws, to save time, and without the intention to do them correctly, because “the user will never know the difference”. I suppose it’s the pedantic, academic engineer in me, but this practice really irritates me. If you can do it right the first time, save yourself a lot of effort in the long run. And don’t insult the user by expecting them to be too stupid to notice that you’ve swept a whole load of shit under the rug. They’ll notice. Their world will suddenly become very inconsistent, with more than a few “Matrix moments”. Inconsistencies break the “magic moments” in which your application or service just works.
In the end, you’ll just end up hacking in fixes to your bad decisions in order to smooth over inconsistent user experiences. Eventually the whole tower will tumble, and you’ll wish that you had done it right in the first place.
