The checkbox Fallacy

Objectivity in qualitative and quantitative tasks.

The questioning behind how we measure things in daily life.

The idea behind getting something done, is it to check a tick box or is it to improve a process ?

We associate so much of our daily work as chores, tasks or errands that are binary in state. They are either done or undone.

Often, I find that most things in life aren’t as binary.

If you zoom in deep enough, sure you can construe every qualitative state of an activity to a binary state; at the end of the day, It doesn’t really fit well with the big picture.

There is a discord between perspectives at microscopic level compared to a macroscopic viewpoint.

People generally tend to describe activity in terms of categories that superset their whole activity.

People no longer tell, I’m designing wireframes for so and so or building a website with so and so that does so and so …

We tend to generalize it off to a point that our audience can understand, beyond which specificity, we think will provoke unwarranted questioning.

If we look at it, being descriptive of what we’re doing, conveying it in different terms, using different perspectives, using different analogies, different metaphors are helpful because they paint a better picture.

When we generalize something, not only do we give way to ambiguity, we also realize that we have lesser metrics to track and account for. That might seem like a good thing, but it really isn’t. The worst case risk averse scenario favours the relevance of metrics.

In the checkbox fallacy, generalizing things is deadly because you don’t know what you’re checking off.

At home, when people normally say. “I’m at work.” The line of questioning stops. We don’t ask what the nature of work is, we’re expected to know (How?) We understand its important and grant it necessary space.

I did not know what my parents did for a living for a good chunk of my childhood. I knew my dad worked at a software company and well, he must work in the software field then, right ? My mom worked for a software company too except she was into the recruiting sector of the software company.
When asked, people tend to abbreviate their work roles.
I don’t get why ?

I notice that some people go to work (at least in my bangalor-ean half of the world), not necessarily to improve the business model or contribute to the revenue of the business but to “be at work”. They associate “being at” work to “working”. This isn’t necessarily true. One can live at the workplace and not make a penny in revenue for the company. That doesn’t construe to working.

One can work for hours and hours without sleep and worklife balance but eventually if they aren’t hitting metrics or shelling out software that solves a problem, it is of little to no use.
Establishing objectivity in scenarios like this is very important, I feel.

Eating breakfast is a checkbox when enough things are abstracted away.
Eating breakfast is a qualitative process when you’re buying groceries and cooking yourself. There is just a lot more care and attention paid to your food now that its a qualitative process than a checkbox.

Parents when they view their children’s meal cycles as a checkbox to tick every morning, there is less thought being put into the whole process. Unless the default is a healthy option and its abstracted away, there’s nothing stopping em from packing crackers and cheese for lunch or breakfast for their child; As much as it would seem like breakfast-lunch has been prepared, it’d kill me to know that I’m not doing it right as(if) a parent. While in my eyes, I might be doing everything right as per the book by giving em breakfast everyday, but the quality of the food matters too, in this case more so.

Unless we develop the affinity to dig deeper into what we consider check box like decision making to what we enamor as process based events, there will be a classic disarray between what is intended and what our actions are and what our actions are interpreted as.

These are among the examples that strike me to my core.

We can approach problem solving if we understand what kind of problem we are solving. What is the expected output ? What are we tracking and how are we tracking ? Is it something that can be tracked ?

At times, people’s intentions are genuinely well meant but their actions don’t necessarily correspond with their intent. More thought and conversations must follow through because if not, communication suffers and that’s not a good thing.

This beautiful thread by Sahil Lavingia, It speaks volumes.

In the checkbox fallacy, we might account for intent or work or action, but unless we’re tracking the right metrics, we not only have no way to account for it, we also have ambiguous slower feedback cycles.

How does it relate in terms of User experience in products-services?

Balancing between abstracting things away and giving people power.
How are we collecting information ?
Are those the best ways that exist to consume information ?
Are there better ways ?

How are we looking at measured data and received information ?
Can it be better ? If so, How ?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

— Prahalad Belavadi