That time that Lime bikes tried to strand me on the outskirts of Rome
No, really
I talk a lot about bad UX on here, obviously. And I can usually find a way to attribute that bad UX to either lazy employees who can’t be bothered to handle complexity intelligently, or to greedy executives who have a (perceived) vested interested in confusing the user since they believe it will shake more money out of their pockets. Basically, I can either attribute bad design to stupidity or a form of rational evil that sane people can at least comprehend if not accept.
And then there is miasma-ridden dumpster fire.
Last May, I was riding a Lime bike through Rome, and I decided to explore further outside of the city center. I took the ancient Appian Way southeast from the center and ended up in a park several miles away. The image below shows where I was, more or less.
Realizing I had to be somewhere near Campo de’ Fiori, i.e. the city center, in about 20 minutes, I made an on-the-spot decision to go north through the neighborhood outside the park, rather than back the way I came, which was largely forested and not heavily developed. This turned out to be a very fortuitous decision, because of what happened next.
Just as I exited the park and started riding up a street in that neighborhood, the bike’s electric boost cut out and instead started actively resisting my pedaling.
I was confused about what was happening since the bike had plenty of charge, so I pulled over and checked out my phone only to see an alert from Lime. I didn’t bother to take a screenshot at the time, so I have reconstructed it here.
Take a second to unpack every word here.
- Where do I even start? For one, I have no idea what an “abnormal” amount of time is. Is that “abnormal” for my own riding history? Is it “abnormal” by some arbitrary standard set by the smoothbrains at Lime? They haven’t even indicated what the reason for this concern is?
- Then there’s the fact that they did not give me an option to prolong the ride. Maybe this “feature” exists on the assumption that I must have forgotten to end the ride, then walked off only for some rando to jump on the bike? But, in light of everything else, that’s giving them too much credit. Either way, they could have given me a prompt on my phone to reassure them that all is well and then it would have continued to let me ride and pay them more money. But they didn’t.
- And that brings me to the last part. While I didn’t screenshot the original message, I recall with 1080p clarity that “for your convenience” was included. And ultimately THAT line right there is what led to this article. I’m not sure which interpretation is worse: that Lime was intentionally screwing me over while telling me it was “foR yOuR cOnVeNiEnCe” or that they legitimately believed it was so. More on that in a moment.
The first thing I did after realizing my bike had been disabled was attempt to start a new ride. That should be simple enough, right? NOPE! It did let me start a ride, but then I discovered that the boost was disabled, which meant that it was as good as walking at that point. Fortunately, there was an electric scooter 2 blocks away, and from a different provider, so I was able to get to my destination just in time.
But it almost didn’t go that way. Remember how I said I had made a last-minute decision to go the way I did? I could have just as easily turned around and taken the backroad route where there were no app bikes or scooters anywhere nearby. If I had ridden 10 minutes down that route, I would have likely needed to walk at least half an hour to reach a vehicle, meaning I would have been very late to my destination. Considering how badly Lime blew this, I doubt they would have held off on disabling the bike just because there wasn’t a replacement nearby.
As you can see, there was nothing “convenient” about what Lime did. One slightly different decision on my part could have been decidedly inconvenient for me. This might be one of the single worst UX blunders I have ever encountered because it encapsulates everything that is wrong with the tech industry and its product design ethos.
- Their notion of “abnormal” usage is completely opaque. The company has a bunch of clearly bad heuristics that cause problems for users, but they won’t even share those with the user so that they can troubleshoot for themselves. They either don’t realize the heuristics are bad and are withholding them as a trade secret, or they do realize they are bad, and are so spineless as to keep them secret to avoid embarrassment (but still won’t change them).
- They see “abnormal” usage as a legitimate reason to simply cut a user off from the product without confirming what is going on. This is very much in keeping with the Silicon Valley delusion that any behavior that is not their behavior is deviant and must be corrected. These adult children genuinely believe they know better than anyone else and it is their responsibility to guide the hoi polloi to make better choices. Their choices.
- They even admit that they believe it is “for my convenience” that they attempted to strand me in a part of the city with far fewer app bikes. Given that I cannot think of any business-level motivation to screw me over and then lie to my face, that leads me to assume that they did in fact believe that they were acting in my interests. And THAT is the heart of this matter.
As I said at the beginning, I can usually attribute bad UX to a sort of passive, oblivious laziness, or to a calculated decision to abuse the user for monetary gain. This blunder defies either explanation. This was a very consciously created situation. The presence of microcopy for this specific situation means it was anticipated and planned for. There was likely a meeting where a group of people deliberated on what to do when someone rides for an “abnormal amount of time”, and they came to the consensus that “hey, let’s disable their bike and not let them restart it!”
In all my years of using technology, I have never seen a more clear-cut example of what happens when flagrant incompetence meets the tech industry’s trademark superciliousness. I can’t hope to imagine the specifics of what led to this particular design decision, but it goes without saying that those involved regard themselves as far more intelligent than they actually are.
But the thing is, as bad as this incident was, you can be sure it’s not unique. I covered a story years ago in which an electric car caused a traffic jam by installing a software update mid-drive, shutting down, and then locking the driver inside because it had no manual locks. Even in verticals with as much potential to harm life and limb as transport and healthcare, this same level of idiocy is infecting product design.
Unlike bad design that originates from pure greed, such as the 737 MAX’s MCAS system, bad design from stupidity is harder to snuff out. Evil is mechanistic. Stupidity is organic. It has no center. And the Lime bike incident, as well as so many other design fiascos, is evil-tinged stupidity.
The people who make these design decisions are not merely oblivious or apathetic, in which case they can be countered by even light resistance, but passionate about their own stupidity. They sincerely believe they know best, and they will do what it takes you make their bad idea into reality. And for something like the Lime bike incident to have happened, there must have been several such people who all succumbed to this bad idea and reinforced each other’s stupidity.
And that is what you are up against. Incompetence is all around you. It is decentralized such that you cannot find and destroy its core, but it is synergistic such that those who share bad ideas will work together to propagate them. In my own work, I have observed what happens if I take my eyes off the ball for even a day. It is entirely possible that you are the one thing standing in the way of bad design. If you don’t make that stand, then it will be on your head as much as anyone else’s. It won’t be easy though. Lovely thought, huh?
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