“Easier and More Convenient” They Said…

The other day in our morning rush before school my wife asked for help figuring out how to put lunch money on our kids’ school accounts.

For some time she’s been doing it “the hard way”: talk to the people in the front office of the school every few months and swipe a credit card. Every time she did it, they would remind her there was an “easier and more convenient” way to do it via an app. But that seemed like the hard way of doing it: find an app, download it, create yet another account (and another password to remember), enter a credit card, etc. So she asked for my help.

First I had to find the app in the App Store. This sounds like an easy task, but all I had was the name of a generic, three-letter service. Have you tried searching for an app with a generic name in the App Store? The results are legion, and you have no heuristics for gauging the authenticity of the app. To be honest, this was an app for a county lunch school program, which means it would probably look and feel like a phishing scam.

Once I finally found the app and verified with my wife that it was the one the school uses, I began the rest of the process: download and install the app, create an account and password, enter my credit card info, and tie my children to the account. I assure you, it was not “easy and convenient”. And when I was done, I was told it would take up to three days for the money to show on my account — and my kids needed lunch that day. Would they get it? Who knew!

So an instantaneous digital transaction would take a few days for servers to register it. Meanwhile I thought, “cash seems like a really innovative invention right now…”

And when I was all done with the task, the app had the nerve to ask me how my “experience” was. Experience? That was not an experience. Our family vacation we took this summer to Canada, that was an experience. What I had with this app was an ordeal.

Come to think of it, that’s the terminology product teams should be forced to use when they solicit people via email — “How was your ordeal with us?” Perhaps folks would reframe how many people view their service: as a task to be completed as soon as possible. And once we complete it, we forget about the app and move on with our lives.

Grumpy McGrumpster today with this post, I know.

These thoughts spur from this great article “Nobody wants to use any software” (hat tip to Eric Bailey’s newsletter), which states:

We don’t need to delight people in the software itself. Delight in software is almost always a delay.

The delight most people are looking for is outside of the software we’re building. Best to get them on their way, away from our thing, and on to the delight they’re looking for — their children, a walk through a field, a cookie and some milk, playing a tune on the guitar, whatever.

In my case, it was “just let me put some lunch money on my kids’ account” so I can get in the car and take my kids to school, talking Pokémon along the way and resting assured that they’ll have something to put in their belly when lunch time comes.