When you get too good at bad systems

I have spent a lot of my working life in systems that were not very good. Not always terrible, and not broken in some dramatic way, but awkward, annoying, and harder to use than they needed to be. Over time I got used to that, and I also got quite good at dealing with it.

I am not afraid to click around and work things out. If something is hidden somewhere stupid, I will probably find it. If the flow is weird, I will usually learn it. If the copy is unclear, I will test a few things and get what it probably means. That has helped me a lot, especially because I spent many years as a normal user in support, payments, fraud, operations, and internal systems before I worked in product.

That background has been useful, but I think it has also made some parts of product work harder for me. If you get too used to bad systems, you can start accepting too much friction simply because you know how to cope with it.

I have sometimes called these things micro aggressions from the system. I do not mean that in the usual social sense. I mean the small repeated bits of friction that keep hitting people during the day: an unnecessary click, bad tab order, a form laid out in a dumb way, copy that makes you stop and think for no good reason, something important in the wrong place, something you can work around but should not have to.

One of those things is not a big deal on its own, but that is not how people experience them when they have to deal with them all day. That is especially true in customer service, support, payments, and operations, where people do the same kinds of things over and over again. The small stuff adds up. It wastes attention, drains energy, and makes the day more irritating than it needs to be.

I understand that because I do it too. I get used to things. I figure them out. I help other people figure them out. I have done that for years. But that is also the risk. If I can make almost any system work, there is always a chance that I normalise too much friction and mistake coping for good design.

For me, this is a big part of product work. Not just whether something works in theory, but what it feels like to live in every day. Being able to cope is useful, but it should not become the reason we accept things that ought to be better.