Today I had an interview; not the super intense kind, but grab coffee with a recruiter, chat about goals and desires and see if companies she represents are a match for my skillset.
I missed the appointment. There’s myriad reasons, including my being bad with dates and time in general, but I’ve got a system that usually works for me. I delegate carefully to my computer and set every appointment to vibrate my phone. However, this particular event was vexed from the beginning by a several failures, each individually insufficient to make me miss the appointment, but together did the job nicely.
We chatted briefly the other day to set up the appointment. I put it in my calendar, and she sent me a calendar invite via Google calendar to my personal email address (which is not a gmail account, however it is the email I sign in to Google with). Failure number one: There’s no way not to have a google calendar, so Google auto-added it to my calendar there, and I strongly suspect events are considered somewhat confirmed (at least receipt of invite shown) at this point.
Her invite had more information (like location) than my hand-entered entry, so I opened the .ics file that Google emails to my address when someone sends me a Google calendar invite. I use Apple’s Calendar app, since it’s got a much faster user interface than Google calendar, and syncs with iCloud quite nicely. It’s a tiny bit more in my control than Google is. When I opened the .ics file, it added it to my calendar on the screen, and I deleted my copy of the event.
Failure number two: events added from an .ics file sent by Google can’t be edited. Including the ability to set up a notification.
Failure the third: immediately after, I get a message from the Calendar app that it couldn’t sync the event, error “403” (HTTP for “Forbidden”, which in this case tells me about as much as the word “potato”). Apple has chosen a protocol called CalDAV for its calendars, and has not put effort into making sure all the error messages are meaningful. It then presents me with three opaque options: “Retry”, “Ignore” and “Revert to Server”. The first fails with 403 again. The second will leave the entry on my computer, but not sync it to iCloud, and I only know this from a little experimentation and knowledge of how these systems work under the hood. The third removes the entry from my calendar. Failure the fourth: none of these options are useful. I eventually ignore the error and set about making it work right.
I copy and paste the event to another calendar in the Calendar app. This time it works, and I copy it back to the correct calendar, the one I have set up to sync to iCloud and my phone. It works. Or so it seems. I move on with my day. I have an event in Calendar, that hasn’t given me a sync error, that has a notification, and the time, date and location of my meeting. It does, however, try to send an invite to the recruiter who invited me, making a second meeting at the exact same time and place. I decline to do so. Points to Apple for giving me the option.
This morning I wake up, glance at my phone’s calendar, see I have no events until afternoon, and sleep late. I miss my appointment.
Failure the fifth: It turns out, that appointment didn’t sync to the phone. I had checked the original, hand-entered appointment, since I’m insecure about calendars, but that one got deleted way up at the start of this fiasco. The app I use to synchronize an android phone with an iCloud calendar is, while a little ugly in the user interface is a normally robust piece of software that has not betrayed me, until today. There was no error, and so I don’t know whether this event didn’t sync fully in some way or whether the sync program is broken even though it shows my event later in the day. It shows on my husband’s phone, who subscribes directly via iCloud since it’s an Apple device. It made it to Apple’s servers.
Failure the sixth: My computer froze last night, and so, it also did not show any hint that I might have an event today.
All in all, I missed a relatively trivial event. However, if this had been a later interview, this may well have cost me a job. This is where the ethics of software design come in. These are all failures of engineering, and some of them quite forseeable. Software must plan to have bugs, to fail gracefully. The failure case here was silent, and may well be costly to users who experience it. However, at the end of the day, there is no accountability: aside from the chance they read this blog post, engineers at Apple and Google will never know about this failure. I have no options for managing this data that do not involve third parties short of hand-entering calendar entries into multiple devices.
There were also number of preventable failures, mostly in the design of these pieces of software.
- Why can I not have a Google Calendar, and interact with Google Calendar users entirely by email? They seem awfully certain I’ve received invites when I have not, though in this case that part worked out.
- Apple’s engineers did not account for getting error messages to humans, and so we end up with opaque, low-level errors like “403” with no meaning and no way to correct whatever condition caused them. We just guess at what might be wrong and try to act accordingly. I may well have guessed wrong.
- Apple’s calendar program is not designed as a distributed system. It assumes networks are reliable, bugs do not exist, and that errors are transient. The reality is that none of these things are true. Its design does not expose details of what it’s doing, does not expose the state of sync clearly, and does not let you inspect what’s going on. It sweeps its design flaws under a very pleasant user interface rug.
- Google’s dominance of the industry has left users with few working alternatives, and its products do the bare minimum to interoperate, if at all, and usually only when Google owns the server portion. Their calendar application on my phone does not speak the standard protocols used by Apple.
- Apple’s extensions to CalDAV with push notifications for added events are also private, and third-party applications cannot use those features.
- None of these applications center the user’s agency and let them make a fallback plan when these services fail, and these services do fail, often silently.
My needs are modest: enter events in calendar on whichever device I’m using, particularly the ones with good keyboards. Have my phone tell me where I need to be.
Modes of analysis that surface these kinds of design and user experience issues are central to designing good applications. It’s highly technical work, requiring the expertise of engineers and designers, especially as evaluating potential solutions to these design problems is part of the task.
Centering ethics in the design would have changed the approach most of these engineers took in the design of these applications. Error messages would have been a focus. A mode for working when the network is down or server is misbehaving may have been created. A trail of accountability to diagnose the failure would have been built. Buzzwords like ‘user agency’ aren’t just words in UX design textbooks (though they should be), but the core of the reason software exists. Engineering that centers its users, analyzes their needs, and evaluates the ways potential solutions fail and solves those problems is what engineering should be.
My apologies to the recruiter I stood up today, I hope you enjoyed a latte without me, and talk to you Monday.