Lately, I’ve been thinking about how "innovation" often degrades user experience. It hit me at a high-end restaurant with a "futuristic" bathroom.
To enter, you wave your hand. The door slides open. Fine. I don’t hate tech. But once inside, the door refuses to close for a timed interval of thirty to forty seconds. I actually timed it. You can’t push it shut. You can’t force it. You just stand there, exposed, waiting for the software to catch up to reality.
This is a classic failure of "Feature over Function."
The Feature: Touchless hygiene.
The Failure: Privacy latency.
The designer optimized for a metric (germ avoidance) but broke the fundamental use case (privacy). This creates a critical failure mode: If you enter urgently, or if someone is walking by, the system forces you to choose between hygiene and dignity.
I keep running scenarios: What if I need to escape a threat? What if I am sick? The system demands I wait for its internal timer to expire before I am safe.
I see this pattern everywhere—gyms, schools, airports. We are replacing mechanical certainty (a lock you can turn instantly) with digital uncertainty (a sensor that might detect you).
I’m not anti-tech; I’m a founder building automation software. But I care about things actually working in the physical world. If a new design increases the latency of the basic user experience, it’s not innovation. It’s regression.