Oh — but you called cold water
TL;DR — internal structure, organisation and language at companies frequently “shine through” to the outside world, causing poor user experience and confusion. As UX designers, it’s our responsibility to tackle this and make sure we don’t get bogged down in internal thinking.
About a year ago, we didn’t have hot water at my house. Turn on the taps — cold water would come out. So I checked the bills to find out who supplies water to our house. I didn’t know because, let’s face it, who cares which company supplies the water? It’s water. As long as it comes out of the taps, all is good.
No information was to be found online. I decided to call the water company to learn if there was a known problem. Both to help out, and to know the next time I could have a shower.
First, I spoke to a friendly person who didn’t understand my problem. I was forwarded a couple of times. Eventually, a woman actually understood my problem, but replied: “yeah okay, but you’ve called cold water”.
“You’ve called cold water”
The very friendly, somewhat resigned woman on the phone told me that I obviously had to call the central heating company, not the company supplying drinking water.
My main takeaways from this very anecdotal evidence are:
- I have no clue how water supply works
- For me, water is water. I categorize warm and cold water as “water”
- The internal structure of companies doesn’t make sense to outsiders
In summary
Looking back, I feel kind of stupid for not realising that hot and cold water aren’t supplied by the same company. But I don’t believe I actually am stupid for not realising it… and I very clearly remember my feeling of “what the heyy..” when that woman said, with great resignation in her voice, that I had called “cold water”.
In truth, the way companies are structured pretty frequently make very little sense to outsiders. I’ve seen it happen so often, also internally at one company even though the water example concerns separate companies. Team A is responsible for the landing page, the contact page and the product page. Team B is responsible for the settings, newsletter and the search function, Team C is resp… I hope you get what I’m saying.
Stuff like this is a breeding ground for fragmented and poor user experiences. As UX designers it’s our responsibility to avoid “you called cold water moments”. It’s not easy, especially because internal thinking at a company becomes such an obvious thing. To the woman at the water company, it was so obvious that I had called the wrong place. She was resigned and a little condescending, but in reality I believe it was a possibility for learning something about the way outsiders think about water supply. A missed opportunity, you might say.
Of course, it’s also possible that I’m an idiot, and it’s just me. You decide!
Thanks for reading!
Have you had similar experiences? Leave a comment, I’d love to hear about it. Feel free to support my writing on Ko-Fi if you liked this article — I’m writing a book on UX sketching. Supporters get their name in there with a gold star.
