95% correct

10th Nov 2020
2 min read

95% correct = 5% wrong

It sounds good to say what we’ve made is 95% accurate, but consider what this means for an online course. Is it that…

1 out of every 20 questions are scored incorrectly?
5 out of every 100 user interactions are broken?
50 out of every 1000 words are outdated/misleading?
500 out of every 10,000 rows on our reports contain lies?

Though many of us have quite a ways to go to even approach 95% accuracy, each instance of that 5% is a breach of trust with our learners and stakeholders, and that has a real cost whether we want to track it or not.

This is one reason that I argue for having fewer of everything. Fewer questions, fewer interactions, fewer words, fewer courses. It’s less to maintain, less to break, less to count, and wastes less of people’s time to find & get through.

Yes, we need what we need, of course we do. Let’s make great content! One less than what we need means we’re not serving our people well enough. But one plus what is needed does not improve anything for them either, it only stands to cost everyone more.

I believe it’s possible to serve even more of the need with even greater accuracy. It’s just really hard to do, and we have to think differently to get there.

Worth doing? Yep!