I’m reading a book right now, The Humor Habit: Rewire Your Brain to Stress Less, Laugh More, and Achieve More'er, because I’ll be interviewing the author for next week’s Life Habits Podcast episode. I’m loving the book and it made me look at the situation I’m in at the moment in a totally different, and humorous, light.

The Context

As many of you know, Carly Williams and I are working with 300 volunteer researchers, designers, and filmmakers on the Habits for a Better World project. I’ve spent my entire career in design and research trying to make products that are well-designed so that users will minimally be able to use them and optimally love using them. That’s why I’ve found it fascinating to be on the other side, evaluating, buying, and rolling out products to our 300 person team. I’ve mentioned previously on LinkedIn the challenges we’ve been having with a number of products. However, there is one that is laughably badly designed—both the ux design and the service design. That product is Google Workspace. I get the sense that while it is in Google’s product portfolio, it appears to have received very little research and design attention.

Our Use Cases

We’d like to use it to schedule meetings with our 300 volunteers and our various leadership, enablement, fundraising, marketing, and filmmaking teams and to store our documents and other artifacts. The latter capability is fine but the former is not. Let me explain.

Our Laughable Experience #1

I bought Google Workspace because I initially used my personal free Gmail account to send meeting invites but most were blocked and I was told that the problem was the free email account. The remedy I was told would be to pay for a Google Workspace account. However, I had the same experience with the paid account. Then I was told that you can’t use distribution lists in Google Contacts, you need to use Google Groups. The only way to access Google Groups is through the administrator dashboard and even then Groups is way down the page with a small link. So I put the lists in Groups but now I was blocked from sending any calendar invites. One of the perks of the paid Google Workspace account though is support. So I asked the support chatbot, which turned out to be entirely useless. I then asked to be connected with a human. This window then appeared. OK, I suppose that I should contact them by email as they suggest, right? Well, do you see a link or an email address? This is an incredibly bad user experience.

Our Laughable Experience #2

I then kept trying to get a human on chat and finally did. However, things got even worse and, in retrospect, even funnier. I was told that my “account reputation” was too low. The reason given for this was that I hadn’t paid enough money yet, either for the particularly license or cumulatively over time.

Our Laughable Experience #3

In case it was the former, I upped my paid account to a higher level one so that it was above the threshold mentioned. However, that didn’t help. I was next told that I would need to wait for 60 days to be able to use it!!!

Our Laughable Experience #4

Because I bought the Google Workspace account through the website hosting company we use for our website, Squarespace, I was redirected to them to further resolve the issue by increasing the “reputation of the account”. I’ve been with Squarespace for all of my websites for more than ten years and have been extremely pleased with their product and their support. However, support regarding this issue has been laughably nonexistent. I’ve tried to get a human on the Squarespace support site for nine days now and I get the following message each time and hitting the “View Queue Status” simply returns to this view.

I did initially take the option of sending the support team an email and I’ve followed up several times in email asking for a resolution but no response.

A Reflection

I have to see the humor in this situation given how amazingly each company has failed our Habits for a Better World project. We’re 300 volunteers trying to make the world a better place and I’ve been paying for these various products out of my own pocket. Right now, there is no way for me to send a meeting invite to the 300 members of our team. I’m expected to wait 60 days to do that!!! Who in their right mind would design systems like this? Imagine a for-profit startup that has their first 300 clients but Google prevents that startup from contacting their own clients for 60 days! They’d go broke! I would expect better ux design and service design by first year undergraduate design students.

What allows me to see levity in the situation is the book I mentioned and the fact that Carly Williams and I get to work with our amazing 300 volunteer team of researchers, designers, and filmmakers focused on inspiring habits for a better world. It’s unfortunate that the companies that we’re using to do the most basic tasks are laughably inept.