Defending the Routine

Everyday life is boring and uneventful: people follow their well-worn paths and make little progress through small and safe steps, avoiding risks and anything that is out of the ordinary for them.   And as dull and boring as it seems, we are creatures of habit – and like being creatures of habit.  We will defend our humdrum lives against the incursion of anything that might change the status quo.

While we seek to minimize risk, we do not seek to eliminate it entirely.  We recognize, at times, there is a need to take unusual risks to make unusual progress.  It is not always acceptable to continue along the path of small and safe steps – but instead to take a calculated risk where there is a chance of loss but the potential to make greater than normal progress.

This is not something that most people seek to do often – an unusual level of risk is not part of daily life, and it is not sustainable.   Take any risk often enough, and the odds of failure will eventually play out: the risk-taker will lose, and if he has staked too much upon the chance, his loss will leave him unable to continue to take chances.   He will be physically, financially, or psychologically crippled and forced to change his habits to return to the mundane, until such time (if ever) he is able to recover the ability to step outside of the safe and the usual again.

And while there is an attraction to risk, our appetite for actually participating in a risky proposition is actually quite small.  We often satisfy our desire for risk indirectly – literature, film, spectator sports, and even history provide the vicarious thrill of seeing someone else take risks, attempting to empathize with the risk-taker rather than stepping into the actual role.  

For most people, most of the time, entertainment and fantasy is the extent to which they will engage in risky action.   For the armchair quarterback, his daily life is not at all affected by whether his favored team won the match – though he finds emotional rewards in witnessing this simulacrum of action.   Even if he has placed a bet on the game, it’s seldom enough that winning or losing will make a difference in his life afterward.

This considered, attempts to modify behavior in a significant way – to cajole an individual into deviating from his usual practice – is a very difficult proposition, and the prospects of success are limited if the consequences of gain or loss are significant.   

Customer Loyalty or Customer Apathy?

In my research into customer loyalty, I’ve come across an interesting paradox: that customers who state that they are not loyal to a brand and even those who feel dissatisfied with its products intend to purchase the same brand the next time they have a need.    It’s not just an unusual few who respond this way: the majority of those who are dissatisfied intend to repurchase the very brand with which they are not satisfied. The percentages vary by product, but it tends to range between 65% and 85%.

In some instances, switching costs can be prohibitive.    There are financial costs, the need to learn to use a slightly different product, the effort and time of identifying a replacement, added difficulty to obtain it, and so on.    Even a less expensive brand may be more costly to use when the fully-loaded costs of acquisition and utilization are considered.

There are also the psychological costs of switching, not the least of which is the humiliation of admitting that the previous decision to purchase an existing brand was a terrible mistake.   Many people will doggedly pursue a course of action they know to be wrong, or repeat it, simply to defend their self-esteem for having made the decision to pursue it in the first place – and the magnitude of this humiliation is even greater when it is an item that is conspicuously consumed, such that others will recognize the change and take it as an admission of a poor decision.

There are also matters of prioritization: rare and lucky is the man who only has one problem to solve and everything else in his life is absolutely wonderful.   So a person may recognize the need to switch brands, and even have the desire to do so, but there are other things that are of greater priority for them – addressing their dissatisfaction with this particular purchase is not the most pressing matter they have to deal with, so they continue to accept partial success while they devote their time and resources to dealing with bigger problems.

There is also the threshold and tolerance for pain, both physical and psychological: a person may recognize something as a problem, but consider it to be a mere nuisance and not worth the time to deal with it.  Because it is not causing them enough pain, it is not worth dealing with.   As a rule, people don’t seek to fix small problems – they may complain, but unless the problem is serious, they are not motivated to invest effort to address the issue.

There is also the fear of change in general.   Even an unsatisfactory product experience is a familiar one, and there is doubt that a different product will actually yield an improvement.   What is unknown is unproven, and arouses suspicion – that it may be no better and possibly worse that the known imperfect solution.   And so, it’s more comfortable to deal with the devil you know rather than face the risk of making matters worse by changing routines.

I expect the precise reasons for “loyalty” to brands varies greatly by the product and its use – but the factors I’ve considered likely come into play to some degree for any dissatisfied customer.  But most importantly is that the statistics and these supporting reasons make it clear that loyalty cannot be taken for granted – or more precisely, apparent loyalty cannot be taken for genuine loyalty.   It may simply be apathy.

The Pseudoscience of Irrationalism

In my studies of economics, I find myself stuck in the industrial era: the foundational works, which were generally written in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.  I keep looking for more current information, considering the economics of the present day, and I am constantly disappointed by the quality of modern “scholarship,” which seems takes the opposite approach, giving further testament to the utter wrongness of the binary fallacy.

Specifically, there seem to be many unqualified scholars who play upon the obvious flaw of classical economics: that it is optimistic.  The classical economists took as a premise that men act intelligently at all times, with full awareness of circumstances and their own long-term self-interest in mind.    So the present-day economists switches to the opposite extreme, taking as a premise that men act unintelligently at all times, with no awareness of circumstances and no consideration of their long-term self-interest.

The problem with both schools of thought is that they suffer from binary thinking: all or nothing, always or never, black or white, with nothing in between.    The presumption is that if something is false, then its exact opposite must be true – which is childish, primitive, and utterly wrong.

Of the two camps, I still gravitate toward the classical – they are not perfectly correct, but they are mostly so.   Man is not a perfectly logical creature with flawless perception – but he is a generally logical creature with fairly accurate perception, in the modern day more so than a century ago because of the accessibility of information.  He is not a hapless fool, but can be fooled.

When an individual is seeking to pursue a personal goal, he tends to act consciously and deliberately, applying his reasoning to the best of his perception and intellect.   Very little is accomplished accidentally – though much is done imprecisely, with imperfect knowledge and imperfect reasoning.

The more challenging the circumstances, the less chance that imprecision will result in success.  If a person is to succeed in high-stakes situations, and to do so routinely, it must be by the application of his best knowledge and reasoning.   And for those who do not think for themselves, they are more likely to mindlessly emulate the success rather than the failure of others.

On a societal scale, the success or failure of a society is merely the aggregation of the success or failure of those individuals of which it is composed.   Hence a culture that fails to apply knowledge and reasoning is not sustainable, and will invariably fall to one that is superior in those regards.  But again, these are generalizations: we can recognize that imprecise or even improper action may sometimes lead to success, and the intelligent man recognizes that this is an exceptional situation whose occurrence is improbable.

And this is likely the proper reaction to the black swan: to recognize that it is an exception, an unusual occurrence that cannot be denied – its truth must be accepted.  But this does not mean that the appearance of an exception disproves a theorem, and it should certainly not serve as the foundation for a diametrically opposed school of thought, or an approach that is based on unusual circumstances.  

Such things are best relegated to the side-show: a curious novelty of no particular significance in the long run.    And this, I expect, is the fate not only of the theories, but the theorists as well.

UI vs. UX vs. CX

At first, it may seem a good thing that user experience (UX) has become a popular trend - if done well, there is the potential to make significant improvements to a broad range of products and services that are currently rather inadequate and unsatisfying.    The problem is, it's not being done well, which not only makes things worse instead of better, but threatens to discredit the legitimate practice.

The problem that occurs when UX becomes trendy is that people who don't understand it attempt to do it, without actually learning anything about it, and the results are tragic.   This may be an individual practitioner who wishes to add a trendy new acronym to his resume without having any training or credentials, or a department manager who insists that his people can take on this task, even though they lack knowledge and credentials.

What facilitates this hubris is that UX is so poorly described - its nothing new, but an attempt to mash together two distinctly different disciplines:  user interface design (UI) and customer experience management (CX).  The first is concerned with usability (can a person use software on a computer or mobile device) and the second is concerned with usefulness (does a customer derive value from interacting with an organization).   

The relatively new field, or fad, of UX ttempts to encompass both - such that practitioners who have expertise in one area attempt to do the other.  The result is a compromise that leaves one of the two tasks sorely neglected: a person with a marketing background who knows a few tricks in Photoshop feels he can also do the design work, or a designer who can kludge together a survey feels he can do market research – so with an ample supply of narcissism and hubris, each believes he can do the others’ job as well or better than a bona fide expert.    Like stewardesses who think that their extensive flight experience makes them qualified to fly the plane.

That said, the guilt is not always with the employee, and is very often on the side of the employer.  I have been in contact with several UI practitioners who feel they are being forced into the UX space by their employers - who, without providing any instruction or resources, expect someone with an art-school degree to do marketing work ... or else.  So it's also true to say that, in their greed, firms wish to save the salary of a pilot by ordering the cabin crew into the cockpit.  

Whether they just wish to be trendy or have a desire to find a competitive advantage in saturated markets without making significant investment, they have forgotten the lessons taught by Adam Smith a few centuries ago, or Xenophon a few millennia before that, about the division and specialization of labor.   

Ironically, the lesson has only recently been remembered, or re-rembered, by IT departments, who are slowly recognizing that the generalist "unicorns" have burdened their systems with mountains of amateurish, inefficient, and poorly written code that will take many years and dollars for specialists to clean up.  So perhaps this delusion has simply migrated to the design/marketing wing, and one can expect it will drift elsewhere when that discipline finally comes to its senses.  

But while inefficient code can lurk for decades in the back-end systems, causing relatively minor problems that frustrate system users who are mostly employees, an ill-conceived experience is thrown directly into the faces of the customers - who have little tolerance for sloppy and inefficient service, and who are for most organizations the chief source of revenue.    The results of a poor UX are far more damaging, and potentially devastating to the firm.