Last spring, I was in a conference session discussing the implementation of composting at a resort cafeteria. It was a good introduction to how these ideas go – the waste management cost savings, the importance of audits and data management, the improved employee experience and necessary retraining, etc. I had heard much of it before, so when the presenters said they originally tried to consumers sort their own waste, I smiled internally and waited for the inevitable “the customers were doing it wrong, so we had to have our employees take on the sorting”. This happens with pretty much every waste sorting and reduction story, at the small scale of a cafeteria to the more complex issues of our current recycling system.

As a way of managing consumer experience, ‘the customer is always right’ has its benefits. However, in building products and systems, you should instead be fairly confident that customers are going to get it wrong. It is not that your customers lack intelligence. Rather, they are not interested in spending their time deciphering a product or service. They will make assumptions and go from there. If you want your solution to work, it must be convenient, obvious, and easy. If your product takes a significant amount of time or investment, you will get customers who really care, which is great for stage one of a business but prevents scaling. For mass adoption, you need to become the path of least resistance.

Let’s look at the waste management example. The knowledge of compostable vs. recyclable vs. trash vs. reusables isn’t going to be the same in every consumer’s mind. You may even have a consumer who has never sorted waste at all and instead puts everything in straight to landfill. Even for the informed consumer, the differences between resorts means that the nuances must be learned and relearned at each new location. And they are not here to sort trash. They want to go and enjoy the experiences for which they have paid. The result tends to be either incorrect sorting that pollutes the composting and recycling waste streams or a default to put everything in the trash as a way to avoid that pollution.

I experience this as a consumer when I go through TSA. I don’t fly frequently enough to know the system by heart. The rules (shoes off? Electronics separate? One bucket for each item?) seem to change every year and every airport, even sometimes on different scanning machines in the same airport! Furthermore, my mind is going in a million directions, worried about the flight, tired from the trip there, excited for my destination, etc. There are also many people around me experiencing the same confusion, frustration, and distraction.

Now, in the case of TSA, there is usually someone directing the flow of items and people to try and minimize mistakes and create a smoother process. This is helpful but doesn’t stop all the issues. Especially when there is only one person and multiple lines, it can be very difficult for that person to catch things. (Have you ever had the confusing experience of one person going through machine A who does need to take off their shoes but the singular TSA agent is talking to the other person going through machine B who keeps them on? Nightmare for everyone involved.) However, it would be much more difficult if everyone was left to figure out it for themselves.

In our waste management example, the resort either retires the waste sorting entirely or moves the sorting action to its own staff. The latter was the decision made by the presenters of the conference session I attended, which I applaud considering it can be easier but less environmentally sound to just put everything in a bin for landfill. However, that did mean retraining, labor allocated to daily sorting and interaction with customers as they take the waste from them, and the development of a waste management system more robust than a bin and some signage.

When deciding how to build your service or product, ask what the consequences will be if a customer gets it wrong. For some products, like medication, a customer getting things wrong can be life-threatening, so you need to devote significant resources to making sure dosage, container, etc. are designed with the end user in mind. Other times, such as a particularly hard to assemble craft kit, you just risk losing a customer out of frustration but not necessarily harming anyone in the process. Not good for business, but not an emergency. When the costs of a consumer getting it wrong are too high, then it is worth putting in the resources to have more control. These costs can include safety risks, delayed operations, lower quality experience for customers, failure of promised environmental and cost benefits, and worker frustration.

Ultimately, this is how a sustainable society will operate. The option best for people and the environment will be the default. This is how you see successful low-impact transit, circularity, and community building. You want to make it as annoying as possible to be unsustainable so that stakeholders have to go out of their way to do so. Acting sustainably becomes the habit and the default.