Admittedly, I was venting some frustration over what the free market sometimes comes up with. So I’ll relate it to this website’s thrust by noting that if the free market has problems satisfying consumers and the market has the profit incentive, how much worse must government be when its incentives to satisfy its citizens are horrendously worse?
Website design issues go way back, to 2001 and before. I do not seriously believe that common sense has vanished. It’s always a better hypothesis that economic and organizational issues give rise to the imperfections we witness. And very often the hand of government induces sub-optimality and a supposedly free market is not free at all. A number of helpful people, whom I thank as a group, provided me with explanations that I’ll mention.
More than one person told me that top-down or higher or corporate management or the project manager was the culprit. Web designers actually have a set of good and useful standards (W3C) but they are made to deviate from them. This is an age-old problem for all organizations with bureaucratic structures of control. The designers have the best specific knowledge, but the managers face a different set of incentives that are not fully aligned with their customers. The standards require attention to customers, and that is costly. The managers often want to cut costs. The basis on which they are paid and promoted may lead them away from satisfying customers or simply ignoring them. They view the web designers as low men on the totem pole and are just interested in getting it done “two weeks ago,” and this shows a lack of appreciation for the importance of marketing. The higher-ups might be people from finance or from some other function who do not appreciate marketing.
One person told me that aesthetics sometimes predominated over functionality and that project managers might not actually try to use the site to see how it worked. The manager might use the standard functionality documentation but not test out the result. This is cutting corners. A more technical issue is that a site might be used by several devices and that may limit design.
Another explanation is that change has become endemic, change for its own sake, or change to grab attention. The sites are revised, but not necessarily for the better, under the faulty notion that this somehow expands consumer choice. A deeper reason is that the manager’s project budget depends on his making “upgrades,” so that he has an incentive to make changes where none are really warranted.
Some sites simply cut back. As a user of Big Charts, I can attest to this. I believe it was taken over by a new outfit. The site drastically cut back the use of historical data to 10 years, so that really long-term charts disappeared. In addition, they got rid of the advanced charting which was a very nice feature. So basically they destroyed value to their clientele.
One person said that the organizational problem lay with a designer-marketing combo that had gained influence over the programmers.
And last, one person said we are living in an Ayn Rand world.
Common sense means sound judgment in practical matters. If that ever seems to be missing in some endeavors, the question is always why it’s missing. There will typically be some sort of organizational structure that creates a disincentive to the use of common sense. It will be a case where appropriate prices are lacking quite often, and then the system gets into a Mises-type situation where calculation is impossible.
The TSA lacks all common sense! There is no opportunity or way to communicate that one is not a terrorist risk in their system except by a physical search of one sort or another. There is no price at which one can bond oneself and demonstrate that one is not a risk. There is no way to deliver alternative information that one is not a risk. Short of a private charter, there is no way, if one wants to fly, to express the flyer’s demand that all his fellow passengers be safe bets, other than by all submitting to the top-down edicts of the TSA.
