> British soldiers in World War I were equipped with a Brodie helmet, a steel hat designed to protect its wearer from overhead blasts and shrapnel while conducting trench warfare. After its deployment, field hospitals saw an uptick in soldiers with severe head injuries. > Because of the rise in injuries, British command considered going back to the drawing board with the helmet’s design. Fortunately, a statistician p…
We apply this kind of thinking at work: early on we focused all our energy fixing user problems or adding features that were requested. We realised it is actually a small number of users who volunteer to report to us what's wrong or missing (outside of regular crash/feature tracking) - they are the ones that care enough to make an effort, and it's a small percentage. So we started campaigning to engage users we never…
Periodically I'd ask to shadow someone for a day or two. At some points, even asking if I could do their task and have them watch me to confirm I was doing it correctly.
What you would learn from this was amazing. All sorts of inefficiencies that people would quietly accept, because it was still way better than the previous state.
Then a week or two later I'd roll out the update, and get huge thank yous from accounting, or sales, or the warehouse because I completely trivialized some previous common task. What used to take 45 seconds now takes 2 because all the work is done for them 99.9% of the time and they just need to confirm it's correct (or correct the odd edge case). The computer became this increasingly magical tool they loved more and more.