BAD is one of those really good acronyms you come across now and then. I’m not sure where I first heard it or when, but I’ve been using it for awhile.

Something is BAD, or Broken As Designed, when it does not make sense from a consistency, business or functionality perspective but meets the requirements criteria. I’ve found that things tend to be BAD when the specifications and/or release decisions are handled by people who do not know the market or worse, your product.

I’ll try to illustrate the concept with an example. Imagine you were a lobby organization who was trying to make itself more relevant to a hipper audience. One way you could do this is through a web survey using an iPod or other cool toy as incentive. The typical workflow for this is contact information -> survey questions -> enter into draw. Of course, the flow of contact information -> enter into draw -> survey questions also meet that requirement.

Spot the problem?

In the second flow a respondeant is entered into the draw without having provided answers to the survey — which is the whole point of the survey in the first place.

Now, the second flow can be mitigated in a couple ways to make it less BAD.

  • Do not send out the draw entry confirmation email until after the respondant has gone through the entire survey flow, and not upon completion of the contact form.
  • You could hide something in the Rules of the contest that states you must complete all fields to be eligable for the prize.
  • If you do send out a confirmation email right after the contact information section then put in a completed survey as an eligibility requirement.

Also, one has to remember that BAD is a matter of context. This post was inspired by an actual situation I experienced recently, though I’ll keep the companies invloved quiet to prevent mass exploitation of their survey. Each legal jurisdiction has their own rules and regulations governing such contests. In Ontario, some of these determine whether something is a contest (those with a skill testing question) or a sweepstakes and why you hear things like ‘for no purchase entry call 1-800-555-BEER.’ I suspect the latter has something to do with it’s perception of BAD-ness.

Of course, it is better to avoid BAD-ness from the onset.