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the worst thing is that the episode appeared in some people's podcast apps before the audio, then disappeared, when I unpublished it, which probably through an error message.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