Sometimes the departure of key team members tears the fabric of best practices. When adaptation to this situation requires spreading the responsibilities of one team member to others, steps that are impacted in the design process can unintentionally become missteps.
Autonomy to move forward is a good thing, but not when a feature can be cobbled together independently from a proven design process. This new feature was squeezed into the release like a subway passenger slipping through closing doors.
The implications to the user experience were serious, setting in motion a backlash that is inherently costly to recover from. The frustration of a user cannot be undone. The makings of this failure was not an unforeseeable happening. It was a succession of decisions that revealed a dismissive attitude towards design.
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