Removing digital ceremony

“Can we remove the need of clicking this button here?”

At a work place meeting the other day I stepped outside of the meeting agenda to point out at an issue with the application we were building. “Everytime we fire up this application we have to click this button here. Just to dismiss a warning. Can we do something about this?”

The actual problem was that almost all of the application was served securely over a https connection while a small part of it was served over a plain http connection. Thus we had to actively ignore browser warnings each time we wanted to view the application. No one had simply taken the time to move everything to be served over https.

After bringing attention to this totally unnecessary click it was impossible to go back to ignoring it. There was simply no reason not to fix it. Funnily enough I would argue it will actually end up saving us a lot of time.

In our busy work lives it is amazing how much digital “ceremony” we put up with. Let us try to tolerate those things a little less.