The Digital Obstacle Course

“No, don’t touch that. Click ‘Submissions’ first, then wait for the blue bar, then ‘New Request,’ then you have to pick the vendor from the dropdown, but don’t hit enter yet or it clears the cache. Go back to the main menu, click ‘Attach Documents’-no, the other one, the one with the paperclip icon that looks like a staple-and then you can upload.” The IT guy’s voice on the other end of the line sounds like he’s been eating dry crackers for 25 hours straight. He’s tired. I’m tired. My left arm is currently an erratic collection of pins and needles because I slept on it wrong, and trying to navigate this digital obstacle course with a semi-paralyzed limb is making me want to throw my monitor into the parking lot.

There is a specific kind of violence in a badly designed interface. It’s not a loud, crashing violence, but a slow, agonizing death by a thousand clicks.

– The Click Burden

We are told that enterprise software is complex because the work is complex, but that is a convenient lie told by people who have never had to actually use the tools they procure. The truth is much uglier. Most of the software that runs the world’s largest companies is a digital manifestation of an internal war. It’s a map of the organizational chart, a archaeological record of which department had the most political leverage during the 2015 fiscal year.

Sedimentary UI: Mapping Confusion

Arjun J.D., a dark pattern researcher who spends his days tracking how software subtly manipulates human behavior, calls this “sedimentary UI.” He sits in his cluttered office surrounded by 15 different monitors, watching screen recordings of office workers trying to perform basic tasks.

He points to a heatmap on his screen. The red clusters aren’t where the work is happening; they are where the confusion is pooling. “…It’s the result of two different teams who haven’t spoken to each other in 35 months.”

The Cost of Context Switching

This is the reality of the click burden. Every time a user is forced to navigate a labyrinth to do something as simple as submitting an expense report, a small piece of their cognitive momentum is chipped away. It takes 5 logins sometimes, depending on the security protocol. We think of these as 5-second interruptions, but the brain doesn’t work that way.

When the software forces you to think about the tool rather than the task, the task becomes a secondary concern. We aren’t accountants or logisticians anymore; we are professional navigators of broken menus. I’m currently staring at a screen that has 45 different input fields. Only 5 of them are mandatory, but they are scattered across the page like stars in a dying galaxy.

The Waste Multiplier

Arjun J.D. once told me that he tracked a single employee who performed 1225 unnecessary clicks in a single work week. That’s not just a waste of time; it’s a waste of human potential.

Why does this happen? Usually, it’s because the person buying the software is not the person using it. The Chief Information Officer looks at a feature list. They see ‘Robust Reporting’ and ‘Multi-layered Permissions’ and they check the box. They don’t see the 15 steps it takes to generate a single invoice.

The Price of Friction in Logistics

In the world of freight and logistics, where every second is literally money, this friction is even more deadly. You have brokers and carriers trying to move goods across borders while fighting with legacy systems that look like they were designed in 1985. When the workflow is the bottleneck, the entire supply chain feels the squeeze.

A modern approach to invoice factoring shouldn’t require a PhD in menu navigation; it should just work. This is exactly the kind of friction-reduction focus you find with a platform like invoice factoring software, where the goal is to streamline the actual work rather than adding another layer of digital bureaucracy.

I’m trying to type this out while my arm slowly wakes up, which feels like a million tiny electric shocks. It’s a distraction, much like the ‘Update Available’ pop-up that just appeared on my screen for the 5th time today. I’ve clicked ‘Remind me later’ so many times that it’s become a subconscious reflex. We don’t solve problems; we bypass errors.

The Culture of Workarounds

Arjun J.D. likes to talk about the ‘path of least resistance.’ In nature, water finds the easiest way down a mountain. In an office, an employee will find the easiest way to finish a task, even if it means breaking the rules or using a shadow IT system. If the official expense software takes 25 clicks, the employee will find a way to do it in 5, even if it means bypassing the security protocols that IT spent $575,000 to implement.

The click burden creates a culture of workarounds. It turns honest employees into hackers because they just want to go home at 5:15 PM instead of 7:45 PM. I remember a project where we simplified a CRM from 85 screens to 15. Management was furious-they associated volume with value.

Stealing Attention

But the cost is real. It’s reflected in the turnover rates, the bloodshot eyes of the IT guy, and the tingling in my arm-a physical reminder that forced, repetitive, and awkward movements always leave a mark. We need to demand that our tools reflect our tasks, not the internal squabbles of a boardroom. A click is a unit of human attention. When a piece of software demands 15 clicks for a 1-click task, it is stealing.

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Maybe the answer is to burn the legacy code to the ground and start with a single, uncomfortable question: If the user had to pay $5 out of their own pocket for every click, how many would they actually make?

– The Question of Value

When you frame it that way, the 17-click expense report looks like what it actually is: an act of theft. I have 5 more reports to finish. That’s roughly 125 more clicks. Each one a tiny, digital grain of sand in the gears of my day.

We deserve better. We deserve tools that are as sharp and focused as the people using them. Until then, I’ll be here, clicking ‘Proceed,’ then ‘Confirm,’ then ‘Are you sure?’, then ‘Yes, I am sure, please just let me go home.’