For every shiny new system that promises efficiency, there’s a user learning to expect disappointment. Parents, patients, commuters, employees — they’re told reforms will make life smoother, but the reality is a déjà vu of broken journeys and repeated frustrations.
This is what I call the Dustpan Delusion: institutions sweeping downstream mess while ignoring upstream design flaws. Every patch looks like progress, but the loop keeps resetting. UX becomes theatre, and users are left clapping politely while carrying the cost.
Scenario: The Two-Child Login
Situation
At a primary school, parents are expected to juggle a patchwork of apps to manage their children’s day-to-day lives — meal orders, trip payments, after-school clubs, newsletters. Each function sits in a different platform, each with its own quirks.
Impact
On paper, these tools promise efficiency. In practice, they multiply friction. A “new and improved” newsletter app replaces the clunky old one, but now with a twist: each child requires a separate login. For parents with siblings in the school, switching between children means logging out and back in — repeatedly.
Tension
The stakes feel trivial until they aren’t. Club bookings are first come, first served. One wrong login and your child misses the activity they’d been excited about all week. The parent’s stress spikes, resentment seeps into family life, and the admin load expands. The tools designed to help are actively working against the user.
Approach
The school hails each new app as progress: a shiny replacement, a marginally smoother update. But there is no redesign of the underlying workflow. Each fix addresses a surface pain point while ignoring the holistic parent experience.
Resolution
The loop continues: new apps, new logins, new frustrations. Parents learn to expect dysfunction, carrying the hidden tax of time, energy, and household harmony. The institution celebrates digital progress; the humans living it know better.
The Optics of Progress vs. the Reality of Burden
The retired newsletter app felt like progress. But the sibling login debacle shows how a new feature can move the burden without actually reducing it. Institutions often treat replacement as redesign.
Here, Goodhart’s Law comes alive:
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The school hit its target — kill the clunky old app — but missed the measure that mattered: reducing the parent’s workload.
UX strategy fails when optics eclipse outcomes. The first diagnostic question should always be: does this reduce the user’s overall burden, or just move it somewhere else?
The Dustpan Loop Model in Action
The constant cycle of apps, logins, and workarounds is the Dustpan Loop in miniature:
Crisis → Patch → Plateau → Repeat
Parents adapt to failure because the system keeps training them to.
This is Tesler’s Law (Law of Conservation of Complexity) in motion. Complexity doesn’t vanish — it gets displaced. If the workflow isn’t redesigned upstream, the complexity is shoved onto the parent.
The loop is universal: train delays “fixed” by excuse-of-the-day messaging, healthcare portals patched without addressing backlogs, corporate systems upgraded but never streamlined. If pain points keep returning in disguise, you’re not in redesign; you’re in the loop.
When Friction Becomes Family Tax
The real cost here isn’t just wasted clicks. It’s the stress of a parent trying not to disappoint their child, the resentment that bubbles up at home, the energy siphoned away from work or rest.
This is Cognitive Load Theory applied to everyday UX. Bad systems impose extraneous cognitive load — re-entry, repetition, reset — draining mental bandwidth that could be spent on things that matter.
UX strategy must stop measuring efficiency in system terms and start diagnosing the hidden tax it imposes on humans. Every patch that adds repetition doesn’t just waste time — it corrodes trust.
Redesign vs. Patchwork: How to Spot the Difference
What would real redesign look like? A system that recognises the parent as the user, allows unified logins across children, and consolidates functions into one coherent journey.
This is where the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework exposes the gap. Parents aren’t “users of multiple apps.” They’re hiring the school’s digital ecosystem to manage their child’s life seamlessly. Patchwork tweaks misdiagnose the job.
As Don Norman’s principles remind us, users form mental models of how things should work. Every patch that breaks that model chips away at trust. When the lived reality no longer matches the promise, dysfunction becomes normalised.
Conclusion
Broken journeys don’t just waste time; they break trust. Parents, like all users, adapt — but what they’re adapting to is dysfunction. This is the UX strategy blind spot: mistaking optics for outcomes, patches for progress.
The Dustpan Delusion gives us language to decode this failure. By naming the loop, we move from resignation to recognition. And recognition is the first step to clarity — because once you see the pattern, you can demand redesign instead of theatre.
Relational Observations
Broken Journeys, Broken Trust
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Institutions chase optics
Surface-level fixes are celebrated as progress while the user burden remains. -
Complexity is displaced
Tesler’s Law in action — unresolved complexity shifts downstream onto users. -
Efficiency hides a human tax
Cognitive Load Theory shows repeated resets corrode trust and mental bandwidth. -
Progress without redesign erodes trust
Every patch that fails to align with user needs normalises dysfunction. -
Redesign redefines the job
JTBD reminds us: users don’t want apps, they want outcomes seamlessly delivered. -
Mental models matter
As Don Norman notes, broken expectations teach people to anticipate failure.
