Is your frontend fixation robbing your sponsors of agency and accountability?
Photo credit: Kaleidico via Unsplash
Text scrolls across the screen. Lights flash and patterns whirl. Images of faces flicker past, overlaid with lines and symbols. The frantic activity slows and settles. One face remains. PERFECT MATCH.
I was watching yet another new police procedural drama. And I was having the same reaction that I always have when they show the user interface for the big computer system that takes three pieces of data and a blurry image, and finds one suspect amongst millions. It doesn’t work that way.
I’m not an expert in police systems or forensic systems, but I know that anyone building any systems has limited time and resources, and they avoid spending those resources on things that aren't necessary. And a user interface that attempts to show all the inner workings of the system isn’t necessary: if you’re lucky, you’ll get a progress bar, a buffering symbol or a spinning ball.
The makers of police procedurals and other dramas seem to follow the rule that if you can’t see it, it isn’t happening. This is perfectly reasonable for television programmes. Unlike me, most people aren’t irritated by unrealistic representations of computer systems: they just want to be entertained. And flashing lights, scrolling text and flickering faces are rather more entertaining than a spinning ball or a slowly moving progress bar.
In real life, though, people who design, build and run computer systems know that, most of the time, if you can see it, it isn’t happening. For most systems, the real work is happening in the dark, in a data centre somewhere, on computers and disks that don’t even signal their activity through flashing lights. This work involves reading and writing to databases, running algorithms, executing logic, and managing all the machines involved. The user interface, important though it is, is simply a representation of the data processing that happens behind the scenes.
Take digital banking, for example. The balance shown in your app is a representation of a number stored in a computer the last time the display was refreshed. That number may have changed while you weren’t looking at it. Furthermore, the number stored in the computer is the money: the number in your phone is just a picture of your money.
However, even though we know this, when building systems for non-technical sponsors, we often behave as if the only things that matter are the things that we can see. We invest effort and time in user research, in demos, in show-and-tells, and we take the feedback that we receive seriously. This is all important work. But we also assume that our sponsors are neither interested nor competent to have an opinion about what is going on behind the interface. We do not expose them to major choices about systems architecture, technology products or partnerships.
This might seem like a reasonable thing to do. Those choices are all the domain of specialists, and our sponsors trust us to make them on their behalf. However, I believe that this approach robs our sponsors of agency and accountability: we are leaving them out of decisions that will determine the performance and success of their investment for years to come. While user experience matters, it is also the most ephemeral and easily changed aspect of any system: those early architectural choices are hard to unwind.
Let’s explore another analogy. Imagine we are not building a computer system but launching a new restaurant. Our sponsor is providing the finance, and will be the restaurant owner. However, they are not experts in the restaurant business: that is why they have hired us. We let them make choices about the decor of the dining room and the fonts on the menu. We even let them taste the dishes, and give us their opinion on which ones they like. However, we do not let them into the kitchen, we do not show them our levels of hygiene, we do not involve them in hiring decisions, or choices about where we get our ingredients.
Initially, this might seem comfortable for everybody. The patron gets to enjoy a nice meal and a great ambience, and we get to run the kitchen without a non-expert getting in the way. But when we go bankrupt, or fail an inspection, or when we need to replace the oven or change suppliers, the patron does not have the information to make good choices, and does not feel responsible for the outcomes. Why should they? We never let them know about the realities of their business.
User experience is important, but it is not the only thing that is important. If we only talk about what we can see, we hide decisions that matter - and that go on mattering for years. To enable our sponsors to exercise agency and accountability we must bring different worlds of understanding together: it will be difficult and uncomfortable. But it is better for our sponsors to be engaged than to be entertained.
