Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.
If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company. Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we need done and the world moves on.
For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up on some random street at an address that starts with your zip code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute.
We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99% of our life these days interacting with them and because the mean quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.
I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small company, that is notable.
It looks like Theo is a US company, so perhaps "zip code" is more appropriate but those of us in the rest of the world are generally frustrated by websites which present a form field which could be called the generic 'postal code', meaningful to anyone in the world, labelled as 'zip code', something which is specific to the US.
Looking at the Theo website, it appears they use BigCommerce, which is an Australian ecommerce as a service site, which explains why they don't use 'zip code'. Although, your usability complaint about the behaviour of the field absolutely stacks up and suggests they might be using the wrong form widget there.
In this way there are a lot of web developers making money preventing businesses from acquiring all of the customers who might be interested in them.
1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current situation.
2) Nobody on the outside has the ability know very much about this complex situation.
3) They "personify" the problem, and start referring to the company as a "single entity" who has made foolish decisions.
This is a heuristic people employ to try to understand things. It'd needlessly simple, and relies on a moral narrative about "personalities."
For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?
The reason small startups can innovate faster than large enterprises is that they can’t afford to make stupid mistakes. There’s no such evolutionary pressure on enterprises, unless it until the scale of the stupid mistake becomes life threatening for the company.
Makes me wonder if there's a real life story behind that
> small startups [...] can’t afford to make stupid mistakes
Yes, well, I'd say all companies do stupid mistakes?
And the small ones need to be good at noticing when they do it, and revert, undo :- )
> For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?
They can be, but I don't think it is inevitable.
By way of analogy, large herds of herbivores are arguably much stupider than the individual animals, while insect colonies are considerably more intelligent than their components. Packs of predators (eg. wolves) generally seem to be approximately as smart as an individual, at least so far as hunting is concerned.
Human organizations vary considerably and it isn't hard to come up with examples ranging from 'dumb as a bag of hammers' to 'smart as a whip'. Analogies to various mental illnesses may sometimes apply as well.
Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-control over the large-scale structure of our brains.
The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).
IOW, humans have and apply a theory of mind to other humans, but don't really have one for corporations (or other large organizations which are composed of humans, but whose organizational complexity is somewhere between that of a slime mold and an ant colony), so we (mis)apply the human one to the group.
This is far from a new phenomenon (although large orgs used to be less common), and many people do have what amounts to a TOM for small groups of people, so at that scale we are much less likely to anthropomorphize, but above a certain scale it becomes inevitable, particularly since it is often to the advantage of various humans within the org to encourage and leverage that anthropomorphization to wield authority, evade responsibility, or both.
The interesting thing is that we have much less trouble seeing groupings of non-humans (eg. herds, flocks, insect colonies) as fundamentally different than their components merely writ large, with behavior patterns all their own. OTOH, we certainly still have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the individual non-humans as well as the groups, so perhaps with human organizations the problem is just that anthropomorphizing the individual humans would be redundant.
You (and all other humans) are made up of thousands of bacteria and other specialised cells, but we don’t treat you as plural, although you are also a single entity consisting of tens of thousands of components.
Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many good designers and good PMs out there.
However, I would argue that the level of skill of any individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies.
If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt.
If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing.
It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into pay bands.
You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get along with their peers without drama. This is basically what most company interview processes are optimized for.
My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.
Eventually, some nimble whippersnapping startup who only hires "A players" eats the large enterprise's breakfast. But to satisfy the shareholders, the startup takes on more work and to cope with that work, they start hiring B players... and so it goes on the enterprise merrygoround.
There's no real solution, just different ways of playing the game.
Sounds like you have a decent lightweight process-making-and-revising process. Most organizations don't. Instead, most organizations create processes mostly ad-hoc in reaction to some trauma, and then never remove them. It accumulates, like scar tissue that only ever gets thicker unless it is ripped away, which just causes different scars.
>As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...
I'd guess that it'd work better with a better-than-good-enough Benevolent Dictator who gets to improve the user interface however s/he wants,
than to go looking for the "magic" UX improvement process
> mandate
The problem with mandatory processes is that people don’t take responsibility for the outcome of a process over which they have no power. Processes should be tools people can pick up to improve clarity.
I wish HN had a 'follow' feature...
Anyway, thanks for your quality comments.
Arguments over features basically yield to whoever has the most soft power, which is they you see the C suite so invested in the outcome of various features... it's literally theirs.
Not completely wasted. At least they made sure the best designer is not working for a possible competitor.
There are exactly zero good product/project managers out there. There are some really nice and good and capable and kind and talented people who have this label attached to them. There are some good product/project clerks. There are some good product/project directors. There are some good product/project evangelists. But no good product/project manager. The term is a pariah on the well being of teams and productivity and delivering the right product to the right people. Many peers have been placed in this position over the years, in every case, they've become less likable people because of it and we're no longer a net positive collaboration. In every case, they themselves were less happy and felt less about themselves over time.
Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager (who wasn't really just masquerading as some other responsibility), but I stand by my assertion. My sampling of this "position" remains at zero good ones.
What would it take to change your mind?
Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work.
What you're describing is an extraordinary team composed of regular individuals.
Comfort, internal space, manufacturability, safety, and so many other aspects are carefully taken in consideration during the design phase. Trade-offs are constantly made in order to reach a balanced design. And that, for some reasons I can only speculate about, doesn't seem to be happening in the software industry.
For quite a long time, technologies advance way faster than our ability to fully understand their possibilities and implications. I believe it explains, partially at least, our current struggles.
This is extremely true in my experience, but how can you fight against this as an organization scales? Just simplify the org structure and define strict definitions for what each level is responsible for?
The moment you get whole departments involved you’ve already lost.
Humans suck at dealing with complexity. Companies are semi-arbitrary globs of humans. Even an extremely small company has enough complexity that one person may not understand it all or make mistakes dealing with it.
The bigger question is, how does any company get anything done at all?
When you have N IT specialists with years of intimate experience with a certain design paradigm designing stuff, it becomes extremely difficult to even consider outsider perspective.
How many working on laptops have touchpads that never ever upon release move the pointer slightly? Close to zero. Mouse people may not even know of this issue.
The only way for bad interface to ship is for good designers to do nothing!
Also, the bigger the company the duller the job. After a while you just implement the damn button and stop caring or looking for improvements.
Why is a dev earning 200k/year working on CSS and JS something a grad on 60k/year could easily do?
Who knows. This industry is fucked.
As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically.
Any individual interface element might have taken input from as many as 100+ different people over many years, each with competing interests and goals (no, I'm not joking). Combine this with the precedents and decisions made on projects in the past (design debt), and you end up with stupid outcomes like this.
As a multiple FAANG alumni, I've seen this firsthand hundreds of times.
I think it's cute that people think IC designers or engineers have the power to make any real decisions inside large organizations.
What's more likely, is these stupid icons were part of some design system somebody created 7 years ago (have to stay consistent of course!). The circular floating buttons were a precedent somebody set 5 years ago on a completely different product (god forbid it feels "off-brand"). The colors were set 6 years ago on some project where this kind of application was never thought of.
And finally, the order & placement of the icons was changed 15 times by some PM, then the PM's boss, then the accessibility guys, then the brand team, the brand team's boss, then the director of marketing, etc. etc. The tie breaking vote going to whoever is perceived as having more soft power inside the org at the time.
Hence, the inevitable outcome of big company stupidity.