Another inspiring blog from Seth Godin.
Seth’s Blog: What do you do when your systems break?
As someone who is vaguely involved in building systems, I really like the idea that we should be designing BROKEN buttons.
It’s not going to be easy though. Systems are designed because A has to happen before B so that C is authorised and the logged as D so that an audit trail exists.
As I read it Seth’s BROKEN button cuts through all the checks and sorts out the customer’s problem. This is a good thing. But we still need to design the system to capture this in the audit trail, and acknowledge the fact that the agent/supervisor has just gone off-piste.
And what happens when the trigger that is C in the example above, which normally goes off to eight places to enable ‘things’, doesn’t get triggered properly. The customer may end up in a system which appears to have done what it should, but in actual fact is even more broken than before.
Thoughts welcome!
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/conchur/1054192789/