Losing our product to button syndrome
It&#x27;s not just button syndrome. Lots of companies continuously fail their users in terms of just being to able to perform basic functionality while marketing themselves as world-changing, good-doing champions for people.<p>Being a developer, I&#x27;m one of the main points of contact in my family whenever a relative can&#x27;t figure out how to do something software-related, and boy has it been a sobering look into the future.<p>I recently helped a relative file for unemployment verification through ID.me, which is a popular identity verification platform. My relative, who is not well off financially, had an old phone that didn&#x27;t play nicely at all with the ID.me verification flow. I spent an hour trying to get my relative signed up and I never could get it to work.  The site was barely mobile-friendly, and the photo upload process kept failing, which was a required step for verification.<p>It was so Orwellian to see this kind of UX on a device that wasn&#x27;t new (and of course, how is someone on unemployment expected to purchase a new phone?) I truly wonder how many people have starved because they didn&#x27;t have access to devices that allowed them to collect their unemployment through this platform. It really kept me up that night.