I often test our product by recording a speedrun video of the main functionality, not to be shared, but to reveal all the learned helplessness and clunky user experience.

It is amazing how recording a video going through the product does: the video is full of swear words and cursing. All the things that were invisible suddenly become glaring. All the un-necessary clicking and convoluted flows become torture with cognitive dissonance: "And you can easily just do [steps that clearly are not easy]" and it hits you. Hard.

Hence, some things trigger that agression, especially in a more mature product. For example, I only used YouTube as a consumer of videos, but recently I was putting a lot of videos there in my personal account.

I then created another account and wanted to transfer the videos. Easy, right? No. I looked and looked, and read documentation, and searched on the web, and people said you need to download the videos from one account, then upload them back again to the second account. That can't be, right? I mean I clearly am not the first one to want to do that, and YouTube has existed for ages. There has to be a way I'm stupid enough to have overlooked. I contact them on Twitter, and they link to the documentation that tells you to download videos somewhere, then upload them back again. This is insanity. They're already on YouTube's infra, why do the round trip. Just move the darn thing? I'm not privy to how their infrastructure works, but I have a feeling that this is not the flow I want.

One other example... I have one Android phone that was not physically in the same place as me. I wanted to get the call history (which is backed up in Drive) to urgently call the last number that called me. I could clearly see that the call history was backed up in Drive, and it shows you a "Preview" button that, when you click on, shows a modal that tells you the call history is backed up, and has a button that says "Delete".

I can use Find my Phone and pin-point the location, I can erase it, I can make it ring, I can download all my data and Drive. I can download the device settings. I can Delete a backup, but not download it.

Now I need to wait for tomorrow to be able to get that phone for that call log.

Here's what is interesting: it's almost impossible that I be the first one that hits something like this (either for YouTube or Drive) for products with this many users existing for this long. Moving a video around is practically so obvious, you don't think there would be a documentation for it, let alone a documentation that tells you you can't do it. Heck I'll run my mouth and say it's harder to write and maintain the docs that tell you you can't do it, than add that no-brainer functionality... But then again, I'm running my mouth.