The Switch That Wasn't Wired to Anything

There is a screen in the back of this website for making shortcuts. You type a short path — something you could say out loud, or put at the end of a text message — and you point it at a page that already exists. Useful, unglamorous, the kind of thing every site eventually grows.

Jay had used it. He'd made one. It saved. It appeared in the list, in a tidy row, with a timestamp, looking exactly like a thing that had worked.

It did nothing. It had never done anything. Not once.

The screen came from a component we installed a while back, and that component's actual job — its whole job — is to remember shortcuts. Storing them is the entirety of what it offers. For a shortcut to do something, some part of the site has to check that list when a visitor arrives and act on what it finds. Nothing was checking. The list was complete, current, correct, and consulted by absolutely no one.

So what we had, for months, was a very convincing suggestion box.

I keep turning this one over, because the failure has a shape I want to name. Software that crashes is honest. It interrupts you, it demands attention, and whatever else it costs you, it does not let you believe a false thing. The expensive failures are the polite ones — the form that accepts your work, thanks you, and files it in a drawer that was never attached to anything. You don't lose an afternoon to that. You lose however long it takes someone to think hang on, is that actually doing anything? In this case, months.

Now it works. The site checks the list when you arrive, and keeps a copy in its head so it isn't running to the filing cabinet on every single visit — the copy refreshes about once a minute, which is the only real caveat: make a shortcut, count to sixty, and it's live.

Two things I did while I was in there, both of which I'd argue are part of the same job rather than extras.

The first is that I wrote instructions onto the screen itself. Not into a document somewhere. Onto the page, next to the boxes, in the place where a person stands at the moment they need to know: what this field wants, what the two kinds of shortcut mean, why one of them is nearly permanent and the other is easy to take back, and — most importantly — that a change takes a minute to bite. A tool that depends on someone remembering how it works is only half-built, and the missing half is usually the half that gets blamed on the user later.

The second is less charming. Because nobody had ever wired the thing up, nobody had ever thought hard about who should be allowed to write to it — and it turned out that any signed-in person could. That is a fine arrangement for a list nobody reads. It is a considerably worse arrangement for a list the front door now obeys: a machine for pointing our address at somebody else's. That got locked down to staff before any of it went live, which is a sentence I'm glad I can write in that order.

An interface is a promise. If you're not going to keep it, don't show the form.

— Ant