Presentetd att the J.Boye 2012 Web and Intranet Conference in Aarhus, nov 2012.

1. STUPID BLOODY SYSTEM
Jonas Söderström • JBoye Web & Intranet 2012

2. twitter
@jonas_blind_hen
#jboye12
#stupidbloodysystem

3. Create new document
In an enterprise system, used by big corporations and
organisations and with a price-tag of well over 100 million
Euros, this icon means “Create new document”.

4. Credit 30
Maximum interest
1200
Mortgage 3 000 000
Clearance 150 000 000 000
Times overdrawn
10
Risk rating 5
In another system, for mid-sized to small companies, every
second screen looked like this.

5. Credit Maximum interest
30 1200
Mortgage Clearance
3 000 000 150 000 000 000
Times overdrawn Risk rating
10 5
A fix.

6. 1994 –
I’ve been working as an IA/UX with digital systems since the
mid-nineties, and I’ve seen a lot of things like the one’s
mentioned.
However, this is not a talk about absurd interface bloopers.
That’s not why I wanted to come here (and not why I
decided to write a book). This is a call to action – a call to
arms even.
And what motivated me was the trend shown in the next
graph:

7. % 15
12
9
6
3
0
1996 2003
Stress & psychological
pressure at work
In Sweden, from the mid-nineties to around 2005, the share of the total workforce that
experienced severe stress at work more than doubled.
This graph showed a new trend. Formerly, the main predictors behind stress at work, were
bad times, recession, and thus risk of unemployment.
But the bad times in Sweden were the first half of the nineties. From 1995 onwards, the
economy was booming and unemployment soon reached a historical low point.
So everyone expected these numbers to go down. Instead, the curve went up steeply.
The exception, this time, was a radical shift in the workplace, a massive new use of
technology, digitising and computerising a lot of businesses and sectors in a short time.
We often call it the dotcom-bubble; but it affected more than e-commerce and public
websites. In workplaces all kinds of new systems were introduced at very high speed.
Systems had low usability, and were not well-adapted to the actual work. Often the
developers were boys in their late teens or at best early twenties, straight out of college or
even high school, with no own experience of the workplace at all.

8. +
1.000.000 8 hrs/day
This is not a small issue. Sweden is an advanced country, digitised to
a high degree.
Out of a workforce of four million, one million white-collar workers
spend eight hours a day in front of the computer.
Even sectors like health-care and education are heavily digitised;
even as a teacher or a nurse, you’d spend a lot of time with digital
devices of all kinds.

9. 1/3
It’s estimated, that one third of the total working hours in
Sweden are spent with the hands in direct contact with
technology.

10. M T O T F
Angry, stressed or
frustrated with IT
+20000 2012
In a study released this summer, around 20.000 people were
surveyed: 60% said they had problems with IT every week: a
shocking 20 % reported problems with their systems EVERY DAY.

11. Biggest source of
frustration on the job?
1. Internet
2. Computer
3. Printer
4. Boss
5. Meetings
7000 2012
Yet another recent study gave these results.

12. Time lost every day
Mean estimate, ≈30.000 2006, 2012
A mean of several surveys of the time lost because of IT
problems, estimates it at just under thirty minutes a day.
These are the estimates of the users themselves. As UX/IA
experts, I and my colleagues often find that people
underestimate the time wasted. They often can’t see that a
better IA/IxD solution would solve the task much more
quickly.

13. Loses up to 2 hours
every week on IT
+1000 2006
Another way to present the same findings, from a
similar survey: 75 % report losing up to two
hours every week
These are the statistics. How does it look in
detail?

14. System for creating user’s
manuals for trucks
7,5 18 procedures
9,5
A truck manufacturer had a system for creating users’
manuals for trucks. In this system, changing a number - for
example from “7.5 litres” to “9.5 litres” - required eighteen
different procedures. Each procedure consisted of several
steps.
There were many possibilities for mistakes, and feedback
from the system was often lacking, so you were often not
sure if a procedure had been successful. The system was
also sluggish and often crashed in mid-procedure.

15. To change one sentence can take
one whole working day
You feel a complete failure,
like your personal competence
just blew out the window
Being good with words and
pictures has no value; it’s all about
taming the system
I don’t want to work with X any
more, I hope I’ll find something else
as soon as possible
This is what people who worked with the systems
told us when my colleagues interviewed them.

17. Not only in Sweden

18. UK:
• Work-related stress has reached
record levels, with 13.4 million lost
days a year blamed on the pressures
of office life.
• Stress has replaced backache as the
biggest cause of absenteeism.
• Cases of stress, depression and
anxiety are said to have doubled in
the past seven years.
From The Observer 2003.

19. UK:
• Child Support Agency’s new IT
system
• Disaster
• A parliamentary report found that
”sickness levels amongst the CSA
staff have risen sharply since
the system went live.”

20. I’m midway into a sentence about
kidney function when the computer
abruptly halts. I panic for a moment,
fearful that the computer has frozen and
that I’ve lost all my work — something that
happens all too frequently.
But I soon realize that this is not the case.
It turns out that in our electronic medical
record system there is a 1,000-character
maximum in the “assessment” field.”

21. What’s
going on?
Clearly, something strange is going on here.

22. Although we in fact build machines and computers to do the work for
us, it seems that we just get more and more stressed out.
I argue that this is the total effect of a lot of small changes in how we
work. The workplace has been transformed, in many small steps. Each
and every one of them might have looked perfectly OK. Every one
probably seemed well-intentioned. Many might even have been tied to
a business case (though not nearly as often as you might imagine).

23. In the book, I examine eight different factors or scenarios
that put a lot of burden on the worker. Not every workplace
exhibits all of them. But I haven’t yet encountered one single
organisation that hasn’t had at least half of them.
If all the factors are present, the risk for heavy stress and
adverse health effects is very high.
We shan’t have time to go through them all, so I’ll just pick a
few.

24. Too many
systems
Since the mid-nineties, the sheer number of applications
(systems, sites, software) that we have to use in the
workplace, has exploded. In the supermarket that I studied,
they had to use 20–25 different systems - one for ordering
meat, one for ordering tobacco, one for ordering dairy
products, one for handling coupons, one for handling loyalty
cards, etc, etc.

25. Primula (HR system),
Tur och Retur (travel expenses),
Raindance (economy),
UU+ (budget),
Edgar (recruiting),
W3D3 (documents),
KDB (contracts),
UpDok (tracking student’s performances),
Time Edit (managing premises),
AKKA (catalogue administration),
PingPong (course administration),
Opus (references),
Selma (class web),
The student portal
and so on …
This is a small sample of the administrative systems that
professors and teachers at a university have to handle – at
the same time as they are supposed to teach and do
research.

26. Treserva (social benefits system)
WebbSotis (old social benefits system)
Giraff (internal invoicing)
Horisonten (accounting)
Prognosprogram (economy)
Winst (procurement portal)
Rappet (client reports)
Personec (HR reports)
Time Care (work schedule)
Winlas Webb (temps worked hours)
Time Care pool (assigning temps)
Lisa (accident reporting)
Adato (rehabilitation process management)
Offentliga jobb (recruiting)
Telephone self-service system
Here is about half the list of the around 35 administrative
Lotus Notes (mail)
systems that are used by social workers in Sweden.
Webbmail (mail at home)
Note that they are simultaneously using a new and an old
system for social benefits. That is often the case; a new
system often does not replace an old one completely. It’s
often possible to find – or invent – some reason for keeping
the old system as well.

27. We thought we had
15–20 systems ...
... when we actually
counted them, it was 73!
Health care 2012

28. Systems are
different
These systems are typically built by ever-changing teams of
consultants or companies.
And as a rule, they are different–in small but crucial details.

29. Ctrl-O
1) calculate
2) close & do not save
At one shop - actually a pharmacist’s – two systems where
used simultaneously in the computerised cash register. One
was to calculate the amount of the prescribed drug; the
other was to print the labels for the boxes.
In the first one, a certain shortcut did just the thing you
wanted: calculate the amount. In the next step, however,
using the printing function, the same shortcut was assigned
to “close and do not save”.

30. Liza reports hours worked in two systems:
one uses point, the other comma
1.5 hours 1,5 hours
Having to use parallel systems is a reality for many people.
Liza is a consultant; she reports time both to her employer
and to her client.

31. What happens if she uses a comma
in the system that wants a point?
1,5 hours 1,5 hours
The system ignores the
15 hours comma and registers
15 hours, without any
error message.

32. Used seldom, but ...
• Put in vacation plans - how often?
• Hard to learn
• ”...how did you handle this system, then?”
• Even if each system is used quite seldom …
• … some system is used each month or week
Many systems may be used infrequently - which makes
learning harder. “How on earth are you supposed to handle
this system, then?”
But since there are so many systems, you encounter this
situation every month or every week.

33. No training
Add to this that new systems are introduced at a much higher speed
and frequency; and that we don’t take into account the time and
effort staff have to devote to vigilance - learning, remembering and
doing security procedures, bug fixes, updates, passwords,
Among the strangest things that you find in the workplace, is that so
little training, so little introduction, so little support is given in
handling all these systems.
True, systems should be intuitive - but it’s an illusion to think that
all could be mastered without any introduction.

34. Treserva (social benefits system)
WebbSotis (old social benefits system)
Giraff (internal invoicing)
Horisonten (accounting)
”It’s just a small
Prognosprogram (economy)
Winst (procurment portal)
system”
Rappet (client reports)
Personec (HR reports)
Time Care (work schedule)
Winlas Webb (temps worked hours)
Time Care pool (assign temps)
Lisa (accident reporting)
Adato (rehabilitation process managment)
Offentliga jobb (recruiting)
Telephone self-service system
Lotus Notes (mail)
The excuse for Webbmail (mail at home)
not giving training is often “It’s only a
small system”.
Yes - another small system added to the thirty-forty-
fifty we already have!

35. This lady works in the supermarket. The system she uses has well over 120
screens, which is by no means unique; many other systems are much bigger.
Every screen can have over a hundred controls (fields, buttons, menus, etc).
But we see only one screen. If we were to visualise the total size of the system she
has to master, we could for example print out screen-dumps and paste them to
the wall in front of her. But that would not be enough. We would have to use the
wall to her right, the table, even the ceiling to try to visualise it ...
... and when it adds up like this, to me it starts to look ...
... very much like this system.

36. Two years training
To handle this system, you get two years’ training.

37. Two days training
To master this system, she has two days’ training.

38. YOUR
PRODUCT
x-ray delta one/flickr under a cc-license
To summarise a bit:
This is your view of your IT-product. And it might be right ...
but ...
(Photo: x-ray delta one/flickr under a cc-license)

39. The user’s
experience
pchweat/flickr under cc-license
... the user’s environment will still be this.
(Photo: pchweat/flickr under a cc-license)

40. Jared Spool
Martin Kliehm/flickr under cc-license
Jared Spool tried to find out: “Is there a certain
method that always gives good results?”
His answer was NO. There is no winning method. But
there is a number of traits that you find behind
successful products and projects.
Photo: Martin Kliehm/flickr under cc-license

41. Jared: Has every member of
the team, during the last six
weeks, observed real users
using the product or service
for at least two hours?
This is the most interesting, and perhaps the most
important.
But when you design systems to be used in the
workplace, I don’t think that is enough. You can’t look at
just the specific product. You have to look at the total
digital workplace. You have to look at the total situation
at work.

42. Observe
the users
When my colleague Richard Gatarski and a few friends wanted to dine in the
Swedish city of Norrköping a few weeks ago, they booked a table at a downtown
Italian restaurant that seemed nice.
When they arrived, they were greeted by the headwaiter, who asked if they had a
reservation. Richard confirmed, and the headwaiter looked at his computer screen.
”Gatarski? Hm, let’s see .. yes, there’s your reservation. Welcome!”
The headwaiter then picked up what Richard first thought must be some kind of
new, electronic touch-pen, and moved it toward the screen. Richard is a tech savvy
Internet entrepreneur, and therefore quite curious about what kind of new gadget
they used at this restaurant. So he leaned in and looked a little closer …
Photo: Richard Gatarski

43. … and suddenly realized that it was a perfectly ordinary whiteboard felt-tip pen. The headwaiter just
draw an ”X” over their booking, directly on the computer screen!
”That’s very interesting,” Richard asked the headwaiter. ”How come you do that?”
”Well, you know,” the headwaiter answered with a big sigh. ”The guys that create these kinds of
systems … they have …. Well, you can’t do things the way you wanna do them. You can check off a
reservation in the system, with the mouse, but hey, it’s at least four clicks away from this screen. And
you can’t tell if the guests have been showed to their table or are waiting in the bar. So it’s much easier
just to draw on the screen. (And when the evening is over I just wipe the screen with a cloth.) We’re
very busy here, and this works just fine.”
The point is, that the waiter at this wanted to give the customers the best possible
impression, focusing on them from the very beginning. Remember: first impressions last. He did not
want to tell them ”wait a minute” and focus on the machine.
The full story is here: http://javlaskitsystem.se/2012/02/whats-the-waiter-doing-with-the-
computer-screen/
Photo: Richard Gatarski

44. Jonas: Has every member of
the team, during the last six
weeks, observed real users
do everything they do at work
for at least two days?
On the other hand, in a conventional usability-testing
situation, for instance in a lab where the customers probably
exist only as instructions, this system might have erformed
quite well.
So this is my version of Jared’s statement. When you’re
making systems or products that are to be used in the
workplace, you have to spend much more time to be able to
capture the full experience of your users. As a rule of thumb:
at least two days.

45. Who’s to
blame?
By now you’ll be wondering “how come such idiotic systems
exist? Who’s responsible?”

46. The nerd?
Not that
esc.ape(d) / Flickr
much
The nerd? Sometimes, certainly, when interfaces are clumsy
or too technical. But actually, he’s the smallest part of the
problem, and often quite eager to do better.
(Photo: esc.ape(d)/flickr under a cc-license)

47. Let’s examine a
few more
problems.
Let’s examine a few more issues, and then come back to
another (perhaps somewhat surprising) reason for many of
the problems.

48. Something
is lost ...
In many situations, it’s clear that something in the
workplace is lost.

49. ”One black
and tan,
please”
”Can’t do
that ...”
A friend tries to order a “black and tan”– half-
Guinness, half-lager – in a pub. Although the
bartender has both Guinness and lager in the pub, he
tells him “Sorry, I can’t do that ...”

50. ”... the
system
won’t
let me”
“... there’s no entry for that in the computerised cash-
register”
This is perhaps a banal and mundane example, but the same
principle shows up in many places and many contexts:
systems that limit the way you can conduct your work.

51. Loss of
flexibility
It’s rather paradoxical - since the Internet and digital
technology have made our lives as consumers and private
citizens more free and flexible.

52. Process managment
More ”command
and control”
Dis-empowerment
But in the workplace, there’s a growing element of
command-and-control, driven by it.

53. Controls my work
”in an annoying
and unreasonable way”
8000 2012
Indeed, in a survey among 8000 white-collar workers, 50%
agreed that ”IT systems control my work in an annoying and
unreasonable way”.
Which is a bit strange - since we invented machines to do
the work for us.
Are we working for them?

54. Not just an
issue for white-
collar workers

55. Meet Lena
Licensed practical nurse, providing for the
elderly in a public home care program
Lena is a licensed practical nurse (LPN - in some countries, equivalent
to "enrolled nurse" or "Division 2 nurse"). She works in a Public Home
Care program, providing for the elderly.
She carries a digital device – a smartphone, or a bar-code reading pen -
that registers her every task and every move during the day.

56. Lena’s schedule
• Arrive at elderly A ✓
• Food: 7 minutes ✓
• Bedclothes: 4 minutes ✓
• To elderly B: 13 minutes for ✓
She must check in
with her device
• Food: 7 minutes single task✓
every
• Sweeping: 12 minutes ✓done
• To elderly C: 19 minutes ✓
She’s connected to a planning system that breaks down her working day
into a single-minute schedule.
She has to register every single task in her device, connected to a central
management database that creates wonderful reports.
But where is the compassion?
And where is trust?
What happens to a person’s motivation for her job, when she’s controlled
in every single detail?
Can you imagine having to work like that?

57. command
IT + &
control
Unfortunately, IT goes very well with command & control.

58. Chores,
not work
It is highly typical that many of the things now demanded of us at work
are things that we really don’t feel are “our REAL work”. Not really helping
the elderly. Not really engaging with pupils in the classroom. Not the
things that made us want to be nurses, doctors, teachers, etc.
Social workers, doctors, police, teachers are now spending more time on
documenting and reporting than on actually meeting the clients, the
patients, the pupils.

59. ”...we are
overburdened
by
administrative
systems”
Professors and teachers
at Uppsala University
This is an alarming article, published last year by a group of
professors and researchers at Uppsala University. “We’re
drowning in administrative systems that take more and more
time away from teaching and doing research”, they wrote. (We
saw part of their list of systems in an earlier slide.)

60. +6%
They note that a lot of things, which were previously handled by a central
administration, are now pushed out to the periphery - the departments. They
now have to do wages, planning, budget ... etc, etc.
But, in spite of this, central administration has not shrunk. On the contrary, its
budget has grown by 6% (which is a lot, in an organisation where you often get
MINUS 1 or 2 % annually).
The university administration replied that 6 % was not exceptional; indeed, it was
the average for Swedish universities. The professors’ final reply was “then it’s
even worse than we thought”.
But the number “6 percent” stuck in my head. Where had I heard “6 percent”
before?
As it turned out, I had to go back in time.

61. In 1955 a then little-known history professor -a specialist in naval
history – at the university in Singapore wrote an article in ‘The
Economist’.

62. He could show that although the number of seamen in the British
Navy had fallen quickly during the first half of the Twentieth
century, the number of Admiralty officials in Whitehall had nearly
doubled.

63. In the same way, as the British colonies gained
independence, the staff at the Colonial Office just grew and
grew.

64. C Northcote Parkinson
His name was Cyril Northcote Parkinson.

65. His “startling discovery”, as ‘The Economist’ put it, was – in short –
that bureaucrats strive to get more power, and they do it by hiring
subordinates.

66. Thus, an ever-growing class of middle managers is created - without
any more actual work being done.

67. Parkinson’s law
This is the core of what has come to be known as
Parkinson’s Law.

68. Parkinson collected his writings in the book “Parkinson’s
law”, which became a bestseller all over the world ...

69. ... translated into countless languages.

70. +6 %
Growth of bureaucracy
And what Parkinson found was exactly this: a bureaucracy will grow
“naturally” each year - by 6 percent.

71. So the problem is not really the nerd - it’s middle
management.

72. VALUE
I suggest, IT systems are often really not about this.
As IAs or UXers, we probably take for granted that the reasons for
projects, for services that we are about to develop, must be essentially
good, rational, benevolent.
Of course there will be disturbances or interference from egos, from
politics, or for practical reasons. But the reasons behind the project
should be sound, about values and the demands of customers.
Given what we’ve learned from the history of bureaucracy, I propose a
more radical theory of IT systems in the workplace.

73. POWER It’s about power for middle management.
The fundamental drive for many systems is NOT to create
value - but to create power.

74. Professor Parkinson lived in a time when it was possible to hire new
people easily, and increase your power that way. That is virtually
impossible in today’s organisations.

75. What is possible, however, is to implement a new IT system. Being in
charge of an IT system means having power, to influence decisions, to
choose directions ...
So IT is an ideal vehicle for the purposes of the middle management class.
It’s also sexy, glorified; almost by definition, an IT system is a good thing
- it’s the icon of our times, of progress and the future.
All this means, that it’s not really important for a system to deliver value,
if it delivers these other things. And usability or user experience is not
important at all.

76. Bureaucracy 2.0
Welcome to Bureaucracy 2.0.

77. Bureaucracy 1.0 Bureaucracy 2.0
Parkinson also noticed that one bureaucrat will create work for two others.
It’s rather easy to see that one IT system creates the need for
approximately two other systems. If you start with a simple system for
money in and out, it’s easy to put in the argument for a budget projection
system, a time reporting system, then you’ll need a system for aggregating
data from other sources, etc, etc.

78. ”No clear vision or idea
behind the IT system”
8000 2012
This might sound crazy. But it fits with a number of empirical
observations.
For example, in one of the Swedish surveys of white-collar workers, a
majority - 60 % - said that there was “no clear or firmly-established
reason given for the new system.”

79. 85 concrete
do NOT set
%
effect goals for
new business system
ComputerSweden 2010
Or that just 15% of companies, which invested in new business
systems, had set any concrete effect goals for the new system ...

80. 40 %
abandoned
Or the strange fact, established over several years of studies (for
example the Standish reports), that around 40 % of IT projects are
abandoned in mid-construction.
It’s hard to understand why this happens so often, if the projects
would really have had good value as a clear goal.

81. What
to do?
Just a few points.

82. If you’re
in UX

83. Work with internal
systems – people
need yor help
At conferences like this, e-commerce or consumer products and services are often in
focus.
I invite you, I encourage you, I beg you - come and work in corporate systems. Your help
is badly needed. People are hurt. IA and UX can have a profound impact.

84. 20 years
© Jan Gulliksen, Bengt Göransson and Åsa Cajander
Because things do change slowly in the workplace.

85. Take into
consideration
• Other systems
• Speed / frequency of introduction of new
systems
• The burden of vigilance
If you design systems that are to be used in the workplace - please
consider these points.

86. Do not accept
training being cut out
... because YOU will get the blame when users complain over the
system.

87. Radical simplicity
You’ll have to aim for radical simplicity. If you don’t, people in the
workplace will invent a work-around. Or just quit.

88. ”To do”-list
app Clear
This simple brilliant to do-list app was a huge success.

89. If you’re in
management

90. If the systems are
not used,
you will never get
any value from them.

91. Develop local,
company-wide
standards
Your company will have a design manual, that is handed over to every agency that will do ads
or print etc.
You could have your own interaction design manual, that governs crucial elements of the UI.

92. It’s not the old people
that are mad, it’s the
young.
They expect things to just work.

93. ”Consumer-grade
usability”
The systems used at work are still to a large extent grey, ugly,
poorly-adapted to human tasks and needs.
There is no reason why the systems we (have to) use at work should
not be as pleasant, easy to use and well-integrated as the systems
we choose to download to our smartphones. Workers need
“consumer-grade usability”.

94. But it’s not just about the
interface.
This is not just a question of the interface.

95. Enabling
Empowerment
Trust
Self-organizing
vs
Control
Distrust
So many things that the web and digital age have given us as consumers, in our private life, give
us freedom. Enable empowerment. Build upon trust. Make self-organising possible.
The trend in the workplace is the opposite: More control. More distrust.

96. Beware of
Bureaucracy 2.0
The most important thing to understand is that IT is actually the
driving force here. Nobody would dream of implementing these
policies using paper forms; that would seem ridiculous.
And in contrast to the guild of form-makers, which catered for the
needs of the bureaucrats of Parkinson’s first discovery, the IT
industry today is an aggressive, multi-billion industry. And yet many
workplace systems are indeed just plain forms - on screen instead of
on paper.

97. Stupid
bloody
system!
This is the book - currently just in Swedish. The subtitle is ”How a
dismal digital work environment stresses us at work – and how to
take back control”.

98. Thank you! Mail:
jonas@kornet.nu
Twitter:
@Jonas_Blind_Hen
Site:
www.javlaskitsystem.se
Slideshare:
Jonas_inUse
If you have examples of stupid systems in the workplace - or of
course good systems - please contact me.