I’ve been thinking about a pattern I’ve noticed more and more lately. The more information you give people, the more questions they seem to have. You’d expect the opposite to happen, right?
Give someone one number and they might accept it. Now give them ten numbers and suddenly they want to know why number seven moved, how number four was calculated, whether they can see number eleven, and why you didn’t include it in the first place.
But shouldn’t more information create more trust? Shouldn’t giving people more explanations make them happier?
Think about renting versus buying. You can live in an apartment for years thinking it’s completely fine, actually not even thinking about it unless there’s an obvious problem. Then you decide to buy a house and suddenly learn about insulation, water pressure, foundations, drainage, and ten other things you had never thought about before.
Now you walk into houses and see problems everywhere. “That part of the floor looks suspicious. The windows probably need replacing. Is there moisture here?”
It’s because you have better resolution now. Once your resolution gets better, it’s surprisingly difficult to go back.
I think expectations work in a similar way. People don’t judge things relative to what they previously had. They judge them based on what they believe is possible.
With no extra information, your customers may simply accept that as the norm. But once they get 70% of something excellent from you, the missing 30% suddenly becomes much more noticeable.
In a way, progress can sometimes create more dissatisfaction instead of less. Once your users see what good looks like, they stop comparing the present with the past. They start comparing it with the ideal.
Making something better can make its imperfections more visible.
And once people see what is possible, their expectations change very quickly. Yesterday’s transparency becomes today’s minimum expectation. The thing you thought was generous becomes normal, and their attention shifts to what’s still missing.
Customization creates demand for more customization. Information creates demand for more information. Convenience creates intolerance for inconvenience.
Epic Games Store used to have a public Trello roadmap. For users, it eventually became a scoreboard of everything Epic had promised but hadn’t shipped yet. Steam, for example, announces almost nothing in advance and has rarely had to answer for a missed date because there are so few public dates to miss.
There’s probably a temptation here to conclude that the solution is to share less. Sometimes, in the short term, that may even work. I’m not going to lie, I considered it for a moment.
Yes, someone who gives you a one sentence explanation gives you fewer arguments to challenge than someone who gives you ten reasons why or why not.
I think this is what makes transparency slightly uncomfortable from a product perspective. We often treat it as if it should produce gratitude.
“I’m showing you more, so of course you should trust me more.”
But the person on the other side doesn’t experience it as a gift forever. Very quickly, the new information becomes normal. Then they look at what’s missing, what could be better, and what else might be possible.
Maybe it’s just what transparency does. It turns vague dissatisfaction into specific criticism. It gives people enough understanding to disagree with you properly.
A room can look perfectly clean at night. Wake up in the morning and suddenly you see dust everywhere. Sunshine didn’t create the dust, it just made the dust visible.
As hard as it is to digest, sometimes an increase in criticism doesn’t mean things are getting worse. It might mean people can finally see enough to notice how they could be better.
Saying less won’t necessarily create more trust. It just removes one of your best chances to learn from your users.