A short story: "Bob" and his hate for technology

I find it fascinating to watch people at all skill levels use technology. And for the sake of this story, by technology I’m mainly referring to web applications. It’s amazing to watch first hand the frustrations, self blame and hatred one can bestow upon any given product while trying to complete a task. Here’s a funny story…

A few weeks ago I went with a friend to a motorcycle service/repair shop to check up on his bike. He had dropped it off a week prior to get some work done to it and the owner of the shop invited us to come in as he said he had a video of them doing the repair. My friend figured that this would be a great opportunity to learn so he could just do the work himself in the future if the problem ever arises again.

When we got to the shop the owner took us to the back office. He sits down in front of his old, greasy (yes greasy) computer and opens up the security app that he uses to manage video 24/7. At first glance the interface was pretty simple, although it appeared as if it was designed in 2002. It had live streaming video from all four cameras in the building, some options on the top bar and some options on the bottom of the screen along with a date/time slider.

So if we were to translate the task at hand in the app as a user story, it would go something like this.

As a shop owner, I want to be able to go back to a specific day and time on the system, so I can view what was happening in my shop at that specific time.

The shop owner (we’ll call him Bob), Bob, clicks around the options on the bottom of the screen (which were presented as icons only), puts in a specific date and drags the slider a bit to the left. The slider displays the time by the minute. It was immediately apparent that although he knew (or thought he did) the day he worked on the bike, he’d have to do some dragging to find the exact time.

So 15 minutes in and Bob is still dragging the slider back. Still no cigar in finding the time when they were working on my friends bike. He starts to question whether it was that day or the day before. He pulls up the date picker and selects the day before. 15 more minutes in and he’s still dragging the slider around. My friend and I are standing next to him and it’s beginning to get a little awkward as frustration starts to set in for Bob. Soon after, Bob is cursing at his computer, slamming the mouse down and stating his hatred for all things technology. He finally gives up and walks out of the office to smoke a cigarette, leaving my friend and I there. I walk to the garage to look at some of the bikes as my friend stays in the office and takes a shot at finding the right frame. At the time I thought to myself there must’ve been some sort of trust on Bob’s part, leaving my friend in the office with all those financial documents, parts and customer information. Eventually my friend finds the correct frame and watches the recording, which was barely visible due to the poor quality.

It literally took Bob 45 minutes to use the application, which in turn he never completed his task and just gave up. Now, some people would put the blame on Bob (including himself) for not reading the instruction manual. But is it really Bob’s fault? I don’t think so. Whomever designed the application in the first place probably never took into account the tech savviness (or lack thereof) of all the Bob’s out there. Perhaps they didn’t even consider the use case of referring to an earlier time frame. Perhaps they did and they didn’t conduct user testing. If the designers would have spent the time in research to talk to various potential users (including all the Bob’s) and conducted user testing they may have come to a better solution. Perhaps they could have provided incremental, prescribed-time options to go back by five, ten or fifteen minutes at a time as opposed to making the user only rely on a minute-by-minute slider, which was very meticulous for Bob’s greased, shaky hands. There were many things the designer could’ve done if that particular use case was taken into consideration and was dug into a little deeper.

As a designer, that whole situation really hit home for me and was testament as to how design can improve peoples lives. If Bob was able to quickly find what we was looking for, maybe he would’ve smoked less cigarettes that day. He probably would’ve answered those phone calls that came when on the computer, but disregarded due to frustration. He would’ve had more time to do actual work and repair motorcycles, thus making more happy customers for his business. My friend and I would’ve spent less time at the shop and could’ve moved on with our lives (we ate Mexican food afterwards). So many things could’ve been positively different if Bob’s experience was a good one from the get go.

So, the moral of the story is…there’s money to be made in surveillance software.