I feel like it was absolutely a money issue. In my experience it's a matter of going "well, we'd like to redesign the screen for $x, but we could throw another link on there for a quarter of $x", and the user will always go with the cheaper option. You can't just say "No, we need to go with the more expensive option" because that makes the client unhappy, and we don't want that, and if you only go with the more expensive, the client will suggest the second themselves. And once the precedent is set with a second link, you're out of luck when you try to redesign for link #3. It's a no win.
But we're not talking about a web startup. I think if you saw the actual hourly work breakdown, cost breakdown, and number of people who would need to be involved to make that change your head would spin.
Recent project I worked on the dev cost ended up being about 10% of the total cost of the project. It's amazing how much effort it takes to move the institution any.
I bet the naming of each link was approved by a 16-people committee over a 4-week process, each bikeshedding it their own way and forgetting about the actual context of it.
Then adding one new link with any reasonable categorization might mean changing the label on a separate link to make it more distinct, and no one wants to go there anymore.
"Should 'FOR REAL' be all in capitals? Bold? Or maybe a different font? I know! We can find a proprietary font that's 99.9% like Arial, but we'll need to throw in specific rules to who can use it and how..."
A failure to correctly price the difference between cost and value, in other words.
I'd be very surprised if the ultimate cost of this mistake isn't far higher than the added cost of adding an "Are you really sure?" confirmation option.
This is why you don't let accountants make cost decisions in a vacuum. Of course if you're counting beans, the cheapest option is best.
In reality-based accounting, the hidden costs, consequential costs, potential damages, and costs of failure guarantee that cheapest is risky if you're lucky, and suicidally expensive if you're not.
The GAP are not designed to analyse those costs, so stupid decisions are made, avoidable consequences occur, and ultimately money is wasted, not saved.
We're seeing the same thing in the UK now where a huge government services contractor has gone bust.
In the UK it's policy to give government contracts to the lowest bidder. This makes perfect sense, if you're clueless and have no idea what you're doing.
In other countries it's policy to offer contracts to the second or third cheapest bidder, because this encourages bidders to to put in estimates that mean they're more likely to finish the job without cutting corners, more likely to include realistic margins to keep their business afloat, and more likely to estimate unexpected costs realistically.
The UK's policy has completely failed to save money. It's going to cost hundreds of millions of pounds in direct costs, and probably more than a billion in consequential losses around the rest of the economy, to deal with the fallout from a wholly avoidable corporate drama.
To me this kind of thinking from management is, frankly, negligent. If you're working on a simple e-commerce site I suppose it's excusable, because in the end, the customer is going to pay the cost of poor design in lost business and that is their decision. For safety critical systems it is absolutely inexcusable, and the manager responsible should face criminal liability. No one should die because some middle manager was cutting corners to hit his quarterly targets.
