A Near Miss with Amazon’s Publishing Platform – Save Draft or Publish

Trying to get some proof copies printed by Amazon sure does open up the possibility of mistakenly hitting “Publish Your Paperback Book” instead of “Save as Draft.”

See the screenshot below:

I'm unsure if there's an “Are you sure?” step, such as a pop-up, that appears if somebody hits Publish by mistake. Confirmation pop-ups like that, by the way, aren't the best form of mistake-proofing either, as we sometimes mindlessly click through the warning.

Based on a Google search, which shows the panicked questions of people who mistakenly hit that button, I'm guessing that is not mistake proofed in any way.

I've made a similar mistake with a podcast episode (in a podcast about mistakes no less), hitting publish instead of draft (as I wrote about here). I was able to unpublish it without many problems. The worst thing is that the episode appeared in some people's podcast apps before the audio disappeared when I again saved it back to draft, which probably threw an error message if they tried to hit play in their app.

Having to unpublish a book would cause more problems with Amazon, I bet.

Based on some Google searching, this happens a lot, and it's easy to unpublish immediately if nobody has purchased it. This depends on you noticing immediately that you hit the wrong button by mistake. Amazon sends an email to you announcing that the book has been published.

This seems like a weak form of "mistake-proofing" where the system has been designed so the user can easily detect and undo a mistake. We can call that a mitigation strategy.

Better yet is preventing mistakes.

Telling people, including me, to "be careful" is not a fully effective strategy...

Amazon could move those two buttons to be further apart. The bright yellow "Publish" button will still likely draw your eye and mouse to it, even if you intend to click "Draft." The mistake is still likely to happen.

It's called human error. Some ask, “Well, what can we do since people are imperfect?”

We must recognize that humans are imperfect and then design systems that prevent error (protecting us from ourselves instead of just throwing up our hands in frustration). Instead of being resigned to human error… work to prevent it through better systems and better design.

When I posted about this on LinkedIn, I got an insightful comment from Sid Atkinson:

“Developers and testers typically experience these workflows so often that they forget that many of us will only ever perform some of these tasks once. The number of non-intuitive workflows or things that utterly lack clarity fills oceans.

I think this will be one of the biggest steps forward we'll make in these experiences will come from the interfaceless app – i.e. LLMs/ChatGPT will allow us to talk to something to accomplish our goals, with more human-esque validation happening prior to an activity being completed.”

Keep this in mind if you're the designer of software or other interfaces. Instead of saying, “Well, the human user shouldn't do that,” make it harder for them to do the wrong thing (and make it easier for them to do the right thing).

Keep this in mind, also, if you're publishing a book through Amazon!

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This was originally published at LeanBlog.org on June 12, 2023.

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Mark Graban is a consultant, author, and speaker. Mark wrote the Shingo Award-winning books Lean Hospitals and Healthcare Kaizen as well as Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More. Mark is also the editor of the anthology Practicing Lean. He hosts multiple podcasts, including "My Favorite Mistake," and his latest book is The Mistakes That Make Us.

He is also a Senior Advisor to the technology company KaiNexus.