Papercuts

The Ubuntu project once realised that the main problem with Desktop Linux adoption wasn't usually that there was one big issue, but lots and lots of smaller issues. They started a project that they called One Hundred Papercuts. A papercut was a minor issue that most users would encounter in everyday use of Ubuntu. They set out to find and fix these issues, and ended up discovering thousands of them.

Why was this necessary? I mean, it's not as if the developers didn't know about these bugs; they used Ubuntu more than anyone else and were usually intimately familiar with its issues. But, in a sense, that was the problem: when you do something often enough, the minor inconveniences tend to stop being noticable. Either you work around them, or you just ignore them and eventually forget about them. This might be fine if you're already a committed enthusiast, but for a new user this assault of minor incoveniences is a great reason to go back to whatever OS you came from.

The funny thing is, it's actually the people who use a system the most that are most affected by its papercuts. If it takes a few minutes extra to copy a file once per month, who cares? But if you're doing it several times an hour, those minutes add up very quickly. This means power users are in the perfect position to improve the system. However, instead of adapting the system to their needs, they often adapt themselves to the system. It takes someone new and maladapted to even realise there's something wrong.

Beyond computers, there are a lot of things in our lives that could be called papercuts, that are bad in minor enough ways that we ignore them rather than fix them. But as our actions become associations and associations become habits, it becomes less and less likely that we'll ever change them.

So I think it's worth following Ubuntu's example by taking inventory of these papercuts and setting out to fix some of them. You don't even need to fix everything, even hitting a few of your most frequent inconveniences should be enough to make your life easier.