I Had a Perfect Workflow Nobody Wanted

https://www.greta.sh/
On paper, the workflow was beautiful.

Every step had a purpose.

Everything happened in the correct order.

There were no unnecessary actions.

I was proud of it.

Then I showed it to someone who actually had to use it.

Their first question was:

“Can I just skip this?”

That was basically the end of my perfect workflow.

I had designed something logically elegant and practically annoying.

The problem was that I had optimized the process from my perspective.

I knew why every step existed.

The user didn't care.

They just wanted to finish the job.

I rebuilt the flow in Greta and gave users more freedom to jump around instead of forcing them through my carefully planned sequence.

It wasn't as elegant.

It was more forgiving.

And people preferred it.

I've become suspicious of workflows that look perfect in diagrams.

Real people don't always behave like the arrows suggest.

Sometimes a slightly messy system that lets people recover from mistakes is much better than a beautiful system that expects everyone to behave correctly.