Hi, this is Mark Raven. Welcome to lien blog audio.
This is episode 3, 32. This is a post that was
published on June 12, 2023 titled, A near-miss with
Amazon's publishing platform, save draft, or publish my new
book, the mistakes that make us cultivating, a culture of
learning and Innovation is still only in a draft State before the
final proof reading. Well, actually, the proofreading
is taking place right now. Now you can learn more about the
book and and get a preview by the way, but I'm going to
mistakes book.com. So trying to get some proof
copies or Advanced copies. That can't be aren't supposed to
be sold because it's printed on the cover you know, not for not
for resale. But anyway getting these printed
by Amazon as I'm doing as part of the final stages of the
publishing process here, sure does open up the possibility of
mistakenly hitting a yellow button on the On the Amazon
screen that says publish your paperback book instead of the
button just to the left of it that it wanted to click that
says save as draft and there's a screenshot in the blog post.
You can go to lean blog dot org, slash audio 332.
Now I didn't make that mistake. It's a near Miss but it's
something that sort of identified as a risk for me and
other authors and Publishers. I wasn't sure if the time if
there is some sort of Step that That happens if you accidentally
hit publish by mistake because it pop up and ask, are you sure
and look. Are you sure?
Dialog boxes are by? No means perfect mistake
proofing. But based on a Google search
looking at this, you find the panicked questions of people who
mistakenly hit that button. So I'm guessing there is no
confirmation or at least, there's not good enough.
Mistake proofing. I've made a mistake like this
before with Podcast episode. And on the my favorite mistake
podcast, I hit publish instead of save draft, I wrote a blog
post about that, another podcast and mistakes.
There's a link in the blog post, but you on the anchor podcasting
platform, I was able to unpublish it without causing too
many problems. I think the worst thing is that
the episode appeared in some people's podcast apps before the
audio, then disappeared, when I unpublished it, which probably
through an error message. If they tried to hit play, So, a
little embarrassing little frustrating at my part again,
you know, that system via the publish button.
In the draft button, were real close to each other.
So, having to unpublish a book? Yeah, I figured would cause more
problems with Amazon. Now, I did some more Google
searching. It seems like, not surprisingly.
This happens a lot, it's easy to unpublish immediately,
especially if nobody has yet purchased the book and, and this
depends on you noticing right away that you hit the wrong
button by mistake. You might Notice on screen or
I'm guessing the Amazon in my experience with them.
They'll send an email to you announcing that you've published
your book. Now, it seems like a former
mistake proofing, where the system has been designed in a
way so that the user can at least easily detect and undo a
mistake. We can think of this as a
mitigation strategy, but better yet is preventing mistakes.
Telling people, you know, authors are authors and
Publishers. I made up a word combining
office. Sure.
Telling people to be careful is not a fully effective strategy.
Now, you know, maybe Amazon could move those two buttons,
the publish and save draft buttons to be a little further
apart. The bright yellow publish button
is still likely to draw your eye and mouse to it.
Even if you intend to click draft, which is kind of a boring
light gray button. So, when we make a mistake like
this, it's called human error. Some people ask, well, what can
we do since people are imperfect?
Well, What we can do is recognize what we have to do is
that we recognize that humans are imperfect and then go Design
Systems that prevent errors protecting us from ourselves
instead of just throwing up our hands and frustration instead of
being resigned to human error, we can work to prevent it
through better systems and better design when I posted an
earlier briefer version of this on LinkedIn.
There was an insightful comment from Sid Atkinson he said
developers and testers typically Perience.
These workflows so often that they forget that many of us will
ever only perform some of these tasks once.
The number of non intuitive workflows are things that
utterly lack Clarity fills, oceans.
I think this will be one of the biggest steps forward will make
in these experiences will come from the interface list app.
In other words, like AI models. Like chap CPT will allow us to
talk to something to accomplish our goals with more humanist,
validation happening prior to an activity being Completed end of
quote, again thanks to sit Atkinson for his comment.
So it's a keep this all in mind if you're the designer of
software or other interfaces instead of saying, well, the
human user shouldn't do that, it's better to make it more
difficult for them to do the wrong thing and to make it
easier for them to do the right thing.
So again, for this blog post, if you want to read it, if you want
to see the screenshot, if you want to post a comment,
criticizing me for not being careful enough for almost not
being careful enough. You can go to lean blog dot org
slash audio 332 almost not being careful enough.
You can go to lean blog dot org slash audio 332