Oh it wasn’t just John Henry. Isn’t it all of us nowadays?

The other day I went to load money onto my clipper commute card, even though I don’t commute. Instead of the website following my orders, I got more errors than I can count and now I am fighting for my $150 back.

First off, the email confirmation was wrong, it didn’t have the serial number of the clipper card in my possession, it had one that was one digit off. (something I never had to populate on their site, so I “know” it’s a system problem.) When I phoned their call center help line to investigate, just twenty minutes after the transaction, the agent told me:

“Our system is not in real-time.”

Clipper Card help line operator

She couldn’t see any transactions on her end, even though I had a reference number and a confirmation email. I tried not to worry about it, and just went on with my Tuesday.

When I checked my bank account on Friday, I noticed that there was a pending transaction from clipper for $150. I authorized $20, because, as I said, I am not commuting anymore. This was for a Ferry Ride, and I didn’t need $150 worth of commuting to come out of my checking account. Again, I phoned the help line as well as my bank, but neither could stop a pending transaction. Pending since Tuesday?

I feel like we are all fighting with machines, constantly. Yes, the inter-webs have provided great conveniences, but boy, if something goes wrong, just forget it. You are fucked.

It’ll take 45-90 days to dispute the charge, which I’ve initiated with my bank. After ten days my bank will give me a provisional credit, but the whole thing just really pressed my buttons.

I spent more than twenty years working in high-tech consumer research, something we called user-experience research, which was a new-fangled way of doing market research while the product designers and engineers play close attention. They literally stop doing what they do day-to-day to watch us user experience researchers do our job interacting with real, live users.

In the early days of my work (1999-2005) it was glorious to have the makers of the product actually watching me interview people, and then they would sometimes even make changes to the product as they were building it, based on our observations and discussions. As time wore on, the makers of the product began to either just ignore the research and say “that’s not how we built it” or “that was user-error,” or “that’s an edge case.” (Meaning it is not in the mainstream behavior, only some weird out on the edge of normal standards-person does that, sorta.) Oh, the rebuttals really get to me. Most of the research I’ve done in the past five years or so just got shelved. The whole industry of UX Researchers seems to be in peril.

“That’s user error”

what some computer engineers say when you show them their products Aren’t working right

Nowadays if something goes wrong on a website or with an app or other digital product, I am apt to take a sledgehammer to it. I really feel for poor John Henry, the folkloric legend who was trying to beat the steam-powered rock drill.

I could go on about the time I had to have the Whirlpool repairman out to the house to show me exactly how to press buttons on my new washing machine. (not the silver raised bits, but instead – the flat bits that didn’t respond, not too softly, and not so hard.) Or, about how much time I’ve spent “googling” how to make a basic word document editable. Or, well, you get the idea and I am not going to John Henry die over it. I’m laughing it off, I tell you what.