Digital Bureaucracy
18 Apr 2024
The sign reads: “To proceed, you will need to present a completed BZ-1 form. BZ-1 forms can be obtained by presenting a stamped BZ-4 (or BZ-4A if you are going from or coming to a country with the letter ‘R’ at its core) at Window 7.”
Thankfully, the above example is not real. I made it up. I too don’t know what it means to come from a country with the letter ‘R’ at its core. Unfortunately we come across bureaucracy like this, all the time. The digital world is no different. We want something which requires a BZ-1 form. It might be some sort of Government document like a driving license or a passport. It could be some form of insurance. We know we need the BZ-1 and we need to complete it properly. We now know we need either the BZ-4 or the BZ-4A before we can proceed to the BZ-1 step. We don’t know whether it’s the 4 or the 4A. We’re stumped.
In the real world, out there, we come across this type of mini crisis all the time. One would think that when we set out to re-imagine a virtual world, we would have left that bureacracy behind. No. No, we didn’t. We doubled-down on it. Let’s say you have managed to procure a domain name for yourself. Well done. Level one achievement locked· Now you want some mega-corporation to partner with you in some way. It might be Google Analytics, a Facebook Pixel, an email provider, and so on. They tell you that you need to prove you have ownership of the domain. They have a simple request - “here’s a bunch of hex characters we just made up. Add a TXT record to your domain with that value. Then tell us when it’s in-situ and we’ll verify your domain.”
If you have only just managed to work your way through the complexities of domain name registration, this new hurdle will present a challenge. Luckily, a lot of name service registrars will provide a web interface which allows you to create TXT records. Now you have to figure out how you do that for the registrar who registered your domain name for you, and it’s never the same type of form. What’s that you say? You bribed your fourteen-year-old nephew to do the domain registration for you? Hmmm…
This is digital bureacracy and it is rampant across the Internet. I might even say it is worse than the real world. We technologists assume a lot about our users. Many, many years ago, I was showing someone how to use word processing software. This was in the era of IBM PC-XTs. I told her if she wanted to remove a character, she should hit the delete key. Not only was she not familiar with said key (I think it was labelled DEL in those days), she’d never heard the word delete before. It shouldn’t have, but this came as a shock to me.
While the word delete is now in everyday parlance, that is probably as a result of tech usage. Technology is a language and it is evolving. Older people struggle with technology not because they’re not smart, but because they’re not au fait with the latest incantation of the language. The original Apple Mac had bevelled buttons. The bottom and right edges of buttons on the screen used darker pixels. The top and left edges were lighter. When you clicked on the button, these reversed. You got a visual sense of a “button” being pushed. Around 2014, Apple changed this and introduced their flat design. Now you had to understand that the three coloured dots at the top of every application were there to minimize, maximise or quit the application. Most web sites today throw popups at us for idiotic Cookie acceptance, some blather about special offers, or an attempt to harvest email addresses. Each of these popups (and often there are multiple at the same time) has a small ‘X’ in the top right corner (although it could be in any of the four corners). Click on that and the annoyance goes away. You know that and I know that. What about people who don’t use computers every day? Older people?
An older relative of mine had a subscription to an online newspaper. The newspaper had an app for his smartphone. For the most part, he would read the paper by opening the app on his phone. But they also emailed him with news stories they thought he might be interested in. Each news item had a link to click on. When he clicked on the link, it opened in the browser on his phone. Now, there are mechanisms within phone apps which allow you to commandeer certain URLs and drive them directly to the app but this particular paper didn’t do that. The content in particular required a subscription. Rather than prompt for a username and password, they would tell him that the content was unavailable to him. To say this frustrated him would be an understatement. Little did he know that he could have opened the app and searched through the sections of the online paper until he found the article. Also, he could have clicked on the “Login” text in the corner of the screen, and authenticated himself to the newspaper (via a browser rather than the app). Eventually he gave up. He cancelled his subscription. If he wants to read that particular newspaper, he will use the “dead trees method.”
The newspaper could probably fix this, but they’re not in the technology business, they’re in the news business. As the tech language moves forward, we assume (at a minimum) that our users know what a menu bar is (as distinct from a bar menu). As we add complexity, we double-down by adding digital bureaucracy. If you think this is something which blights only you, I am here to tell you that it affects everyone.
What can we do about it?
Well, as the saying goes, acknowledging there’s a problem is the first step. We technologists need to keep a weather eye on how we create user interfaces. Not just the menu bar, but the customer flow, from emailed link to news article. This is especially true of eCommerce. Someone once said that “people go to hardware stores to buy holes, not drill bits.” This is very true. We want the benefits, not the features. Increasing sales friction in an online shop is one sure way of getting customers to go elsewhere. Sites which require registration, complete with email verification, before accepting orders are definitely on my “hit list” in this regard. Those that present the two alternatives (“create an account or continue as a guest”) are a distinct improvement. It’s worth considering how much additional digital bureaucracy your online presence adds to the overall melee. Could you make it easier for your customers to do business with you?