Every broken system was designed by someone who meant well.
I needed to update my Aadhaar card for my SAT exam. Aadhaar is India’s identity document — think of it as a national ID that carries your biometrics. My mother helped me find a place where it could be done. Aadhaar update facilities are set up across various locations — some permanent, some temporary — and this was one of them.
The place had a purpose. The machine was procured. The counter was staffed. Somewhere upstream, someone made a decision that this service should exist — and that decision came from a good place.
But the moment I walked in, something felt off. There was no signage telling you where to go. We went to two counters to ask. Neither could help — not because they didn’t want to, but because nobody had been given clear ownership of that task.
The woman in charge arrived a few minutes later. The person ahead of us was a young mother with two small children. The process got complicated. I watched the woman in charge lose her patience. I didn’t judge her — high footfall, low resources, no real incentive tied to how gently she handled someone. The system hadn’t set her up to be patient. It had set her up to process.
Then it was my turn. I pressed my fingers onto a machine that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. Nobody bought the machine and decided it would go uncleaned. It just happened — in this case, somewhere between the intention and the execution, something got lost.
But good intent at the top doesn’t guarantee good experience at the bottom. Between the policy and the person. Between the procurement and the maintenance. Between what was designed and what was felt.
The question worth asking isn’t who meant well. It’s how do we make the intent travel — all the way down, to the person pressing their fingers on the machine?
That’s the design problem nobody talks about.
