I only like a few of my socks. You can often find me tunneling through my sock drawer to find the few pairs I prefer. My whole sock system really isn’t working that well for me, if I think about it. But because the level of pain its causing me is so low relative to the bigger challenges of my daily life, I don’t think about it.

Similarly, I've got Zoom set to auto-record meetings. It can come in handy if, like me, you forget to hit the record button. The only problem: most of my meetings don't need to be recorded and some shouldn't be.

Instead of taking 5 minutes to figure out how to turn off auto-record, I spend seconds at the start of every meeting turning off the recording, then deleting the TWO email notifications for that 2-4 second recording (one for the recording, and one for the transcript being processed).

Those recordings take up space in the cloud, the emails take up space in my inbox, and the whole process adds noise to my already noisy life. But this inconvenience ranks too low on the list of my life’s problems to merit my attention.

These are perfect examples of workarounds. Humans manage around around the suboptimal systems every day without much thought, so long as they're not prevented from getting the thing done.

Because the inconveniences are minor, we often overlook the workarounds. We don’t complain about them—or even mention them. But they’re easily discovered by a curious observer.

“Why are you digging to the bottom corner of the sock drawer?”

“And now you’re deleting emails generated by that 2-second recording?”

Workarounds are a magical opportunity for product design.

Observe users to discover the workarounds they use to be successful with your product. Then find ways to render the workaround unneeded.. For example, Zoom could auto-detect recordings less than 10 or 20 seconds in length. Users would be delighted.

And of course, if you need help observing your users, or ideating around how to address their workarounds, I know a great UX team. ;-)

P.S.: I finally sacrificed the 5 minutes to figure out how to turn off auto-record. Maybe I'll use that time to go buy some more socks I actually like.