Fable
Only those who understand the counter know where to press next
In the mountain city there was a freight company, and all orders were processed in an old window. The window had buttons, forms, dropdowns, and occasional pop-up prompts. The veteran worker did not need to think; with one glance he knew where the waybill number was and where the exception marker was.
The new assistant was great at reciting the process. He knew to check the order first, then change the address, and finally save. But he didn't look at the interface; he just typed in a fixed sequence. If the page loaded a little slowly, an extra popup appeared, or a button was grayed out once, all subsequent actions went out of alignment.
The manager wrote him longer steps: if you see red text, stop; if you see a green button, click; if you cannot find save, look to the right. The more detailed the steps, the more the assistant depended on the text. A slight interface redesign made the whole set of steps like a carriage that had lost its map.
Once a customer asked to change the delivery time. The assistant, following the old process, clicked into the address field and filled the date into the street field. The system did not report an error immediately, and it was only discovered when the driver arrived at the wrong place. The shopkeeper then realized the problem was not that there were too few steps, but that the assistant did not truly understand the objects and states on the screen.
Later they trained another assistant. He didn't start by memorizing button coordinates but by observing the page: here's a table, there's an edit area, this button isn't clickable right now, this dialog is asking for confirmation, this red line means validation failed. He treated the interface as a changing workplace, not a fixed board.
The new assistant also makes mistakes, but its mistakes are explainable. When it encounters an uncertain button, it takes a screenshot and asks; when it finds that the state has not changed after saving, it rereads the page; when it sees high-risk fields such as price, payment account, and shipping address, it asks the shopkeeper to confirm.
A few weeks later, the freight company handed low-risk tasks such as changing addresses, adding phone numbers, and checking status to the new assistant. Complex exceptions were still handled by people. Every waybill’s clicks, inputs, pop-ups, and final status left a record, so customer complaints could be reviewed.
The shopkeeper finally said that being able to operate a window does not mean clicking windows at random. A truly usable assistant must be able to read the interface, understand controls, track state, and stop when risk appears. Only then can work in old software be reliably handed to an office assistant.