I helped break online shopping. Not on purpose.
Five years at a returns startup and one question I wish I'd asked sooner
Some Designers is a newsletter about design, the people doing it, and what we’re all figuring out as things change faster than anyone expected. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is pass it on. My name is Raff and I am a Senior Manager at Optimizely, and I have been working in design for over 10 years.
I worked at a startup called Doddle for nearly 5 years and I designed returns technology.
Not the most glamorous corner of e-commerce, I’ll admit. But a genuinely painful problem.
If you tried to return something online before the pandemic, you know what it was like. You’d dig out an email, contact customer service, wait for a label, print it out (who still has a printer?) find a box, carry it to a corner shop, and hope the person behind the counter had any idea what to do with it. Most of the time, they didn’t.
We fixed that. We digitised the whole process, gave consumers clear options for how and where to return, and eventually built physical kiosks that made the whole thing almost effortless.
The biggest retailer in the world used them. Major retailers across Australia ran on our platform. The NPS scores were excellent. By every measure we tracked, we were succeeding. The problem is what we weren’t tracking.
And then you realise that Goodhart’s Law is actually spot on:
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Returns were hitting rates nobody had planned for. Around 30% across the clothing industry. Some retailers were touching 40%. Once you do the maths, the scale of what was happening becomes hard to ignore.
Think about 1,000 items shipped to customers. Each one carries a logistics cost to get there. When 300 come back, you add the reverse logistics cost, the emissions from a second journey, the warehouse processing, and the packaging that can’t be reused. A significant chunk of those returned items never go back on sale. They go to landfill.
We started noticing this not because someone handed us a report. Our customer conversations just changed. Retailers stopped asking how to make returns faster. They started asking how to make returns stop. They asked us to put back in friction! We’d spent years optimising the very thing they now needed less of.
Which is quite funny for a designer, in a painful kind of way!
The bedroom became the fitting room.
That phrase captures it better than any metric. Easy returns didn’t just improve an experience. They changed how people shopped. Buy three sizes, keep one, send the rest back. It became completely normal behaviour. We didn’t design that intentionally. We created the conditions for it, optimised those conditions, and watched it scale past anything we’d imagined.
We thought we were designing a feature. We were actually shaping how millions of people thought about buying clothes.
We weren’t careless. We were competent. We solved the problem we’d been given, hit the metrics we’d agreed to, and made users happy. We just never stopped to ask what would happen when all of that worked.
Tristan Harris and a shared reality.
If you’ve watched The Social Dilemma, you know who Tristan Harris is. He was working at Gmail when an engineer walked over and suggested, casually, that phones should buzz every time you get an email. No debate. No real consideration of what that might mean at scale. Just: seems useful, let’s ship it.
That one decision contributed meaningfully to a generation of people who can’t sit with their own thoughts for more than ninety seconds. The incentive was clear. The metrics were clean. The consequences were invisible until they weren’t.
He spent years afterwards trying to get the industry to ask better questions before shipping. Did much change? Not really. It’s very difficult in tech. We all know that.
But what strikes me about both stories isn’t that the people involved were negligent. It’s that the pattern is so completely ordinary. Remove friction. Ship fast. Deal with consequences later, when they’re too big to ignore or someone else’s problem entirely.
Nobody sat down and decided to break how people shop, or to help create the most anxious generation on record. They just didn’t ask what would happen next.
And now we’re doing it again.
When I was still at Doddle, I did a short design ethics course. One of the simplest things I took away was a framework for thinking through consequences before you ship. It’s not complicated. You just ask yourself: what happens next? Three times over.
The first answer is always obvious. And this would have been for Doddle considering our initial mission to remove friction from the returns process.
What happens next?
The user completes the task faster. Fine. Good, even. And then?
People start behaving differently because of that ease. And then?
The behaviour scales and now there’s a cost nobody planned for.
It’s easy to do this exercise when you already know the ending, I realise. Hindsight makes it look simple. But the point isn’t to predict the future perfectly. The point is to build the habit of asking before you ship rather than after. Most of the time, the third answer won’t be catastrophic. But occasionally it will be something worth knowing before you’ve already built the thing.
I also know this is easier said than done when a business is moving fast and shipping faster. But framing it around risk rather than process tends to land better in those conversations. Nobody wants to launch something that becomes a problem they can’t grow out of three years from now.
What are you building at the moment, and what happens next?