The End of Self-Service: When we ask too much from our users
Has this ever happened to you: you settle in for what you think is going to be a moderate level task and find it turns into an Olympic endeavor? Perhaps, you’re building a dashboard, a user training, or doing a task you know will take some effort, but should be feasible.
Except, you turn briefly and a rake hits your face. So, this isn’t the direction to go, and you step a different direction.
You hit another rake.
Our rakes show up a number of ways – whether as unintended side quests to fix what seems like a small error to additional logins to various sites to needing to go ask 5 people because something was not in the documentation.
Small frictions add up. On the surface, small friction is easy to dismiss. That is, until everything becomes friction.
Self Service Everywhere
You login into work. It’s time to change your password. So you do, updating your password manager. Except, there’s an issue with that and you need to login to a different place to address it.
Updates are due, but you don’t have control of your PC. You need to schedule a time for your computer to be occupied. You check your calendar, but get interrupted by your boss for another, more urgent side quest.
You pivot to building this urgent dashboard. The data seems off, so you check with the DBA. You both peruse the workflows, the data sources, and everything seems in order. You decide to hit the primary owner of the key data point in question.
You check their calendar. With your permissions, you can only see busy and open times, and this calendar looks atrocious – wall to wall meetings and not a spare block for what looks like weeks. A few blocks look like they might be reserves for focus time.
You ping the person on the messaging platform. No response. You try to make headway where you can, but the growing knot in your belly tells you that you can’t show this until you track down this data error.
You’re blocked. And still no response. Your boss pings about your progress. You send a quick reply that you need information from the data owner.
“Go ask them,” is the terse reply.
You get up from your desk and try to remember where this person is located. You sift through SharePoint, Google Drive, and the sundry of other sources to find a listing and a map. Frustrated, you ask your coworker, who moves their headphones and glares at you.
“I don’t know,” they say, quickly returning to their screen.
You ping the DBA. They tell you where to go. You do.
The person in question is in an office, door closed, and clearly on a call. You briefly wait – it’s almost close to a time when meetings end. No dice. You return to your desk, try to make a bit more progress before trying again.
The office is empty.
You ping your boss and ask if they have more insight to this person’s calendar. “It’s on the calendar and I need this before 4,” is the only reply. You decide to decamp to a space closer to this person’s office. You wander by people to see if perhaps they have more access, more knowledge of this person, or dare it be too much to hope – the question itself.
Nothing. You try to search additional resources. Still nothing. You google anything you think might be related and, feeling desperate, phrase vague questions to GenAI. Still nothing.
Your phone dings several times – emails from your child’s school’s learning management system. You’ll have to address these later to make sure homework is being done on time.
The person heads to to their office. You swiftly call to them, apologizing for interrupting, and quickly asking if they have more details on said data point. This person looks at you, clearly caught in their own overwhelm, sighing, but willing to engage.
You look at how the data point came to be. It’s another system that integrates between your busy person and a different department. It looks like an issue with integration, so you both call over to that department. No answer.
You ping someone that looks online. No answer. You both continue looking and try a few others to ping. You reach someone after 3 tries.
“Oh, that? No, it’s a known issue. We’re trying to get new software to correct it. We use a spreadsheet to help fix it. Maybe IT can get you access.”
You both put in a ticket and the data owner calls to try to escalate. You let your boss know and show what you have. No one feels satisfied.
You call this Tuesday and head back to your desk to figure out the password manager issue.
The overwhelm factor
Can you name all the systems you interface with? Did you start with work systems? How about those in your home?
Each self-service interface handles a certain facet of something we need. If it works, we can usually get in and get out. We develop our cadences – go here first, then there, make sure you do this 3rd thing. Our mental checklist grows and we go about our day.
Except when something goes wrong. How many rakes can you take in a day? What size blip causes a full derail?
Overwhelm happens when the pace of demands outpace the speed in which we can resolve them. The queue backs up, and we stop seeing the light from all the stuff.
Personal and professional overwhelm can intersect. They often do.
Having strong community can help defray overwhelm – there’s more people who can pitch in and pick up pieces. In a workplace, this may be additional teammates who can take on a task or two, or that patient coworker that loves you enough to help with expense reports.
A key challenge with self-service is that – long term – it replaces communities of support, shifting from a large network to fewer individuals. Fewer people try to support more users. That’s the goal.
Short term, we have resources to migrate the change. Long term, those resources vanish, which makes resolving issues much harder.
When we deploy self service for everything, small hiccups can quickly become big hiccups. Dependancies break and fewer people exist to solve the bigger problem. It can also lead to fatigue and burnout, when the navigational needs far outpace the resources that exist.
Burnt to a crisp
When demands outpace our resources to resolve them, fatigue gives way to burnout.
Data points on burnout vary widely depending on the nuance you apply. Healthcare workers, for example, have very high rates.
Insecurity, lack of control, and loss of autonomy feed burnout. Personal overwhelm, especially caregiving, are like gasoline on an already warm flame. Neurodivergence can send the whole thing nuclear – the world can be overwhelming at baseline, let alone when things are on fire.
What we should assume is that we’re interacting with a high number of burnt out folks, or at least with many that are headed in that direction. Burnout requires support. We have to shift in models that do more than provide direction, but actively journey with us again and walk beside us.
The end of self-service doesn’t mean dismantling it. Rather, we supplement it…again. We need some service with the self-service. We need care, compassion, and the ability for others to solve things. We need people with power and time to fix things.
We have to acknowledge where we are now – under-resourced, overwhelmed, and lacking time and connection. The answer here, though, isn’t more forced work get-togethers, but time to do work well and the space to attend to coworkers when they ask. It’s setting up contacts for when things go awry, making clear in tools who owns what, and simplifying.
The TL;DR Question Guide
How many self-service tools do you have? Where can you simplify?
Can you set up office hours for drop-in support?
Can you incentivize people helping people? This means allowing time to do it that on the surface seems highly inefficient – helping a user for an hour. One user. One hour. And be happy with it.
Can you identify your helpers (the people already quietly helping others) and ensure they’re appropriately thanked and given the time and resources to keep doing it? Thanking can include compensation, but may also be a day off, a budget for certain things, or really listening to what’s needed.
For companies feeling radical – where can you add staff to create a human touch on things? As GenAI automation threatens to eat so much, where can you prioritize fingerprints and real humans?
And lastly, you – dear reader who somehow made it this far – what can you do to preserve yourself? What people do you need to catch up with, tasks do you need to drop, and little acts of either self-care or defiance can you add?
This post has been brought to you by the following distractions:
- Needing to login (again) to renew a license
- Attempting to find a file on several cloud services, a local repo, and finally an email from someone else
- Too much caffeine and protein shakes
- Endless emails from Canvas affirming homework was at least submitted by a child
- Apple demanding another login to Music
- Apple attempting to force me to use Numbers (no, no, and still no)
- Dates in Unix format getting rendered badly and broken by updates – note to self: stop using 10+ year old files in demos.
- Closing QuickTime too often when ending a recording
- Losing files due to bad naming conventions
- Side quest of writing this very post
- Ranting in too many Slack spaces (thank you my very patient people)
- Obsessively listening to Yasmin Williams – may you too find the calm (thank you forever to Ann Stolzman for this rec).
- Password manager battles
I’m sure GenAI will attempt to scrape this post at some point. It has em-dashes. It speaks with some level of authority. My blog is already fodder for so much crap on it, and my book is part of LLAMA without my consent. So, why not dip at the well again?
This statement expressly prohibits it. How that will stand up in courts, the test of time, who knows? But, my effort with too few fingers on a keyboard went into it, along with a lot of hopes for human compassion. We’re going to need it.
Our biggest loss if we let it won’t be creativity, but empathy and trust. You see, you’ve made it this far hopefully, because you know there’s a human on the other end who cares, who (perhaps naively) believes we can do things better and can maybe put in a tiny bit of gentleness along the way.
To finding a way…