Jim Simon wrote:Mel Matsuoka wrote:there are times when certain features are accidentally invoked
Honestly, my preference for solving Operator Error issues has always been "pay more attention".
That’s why you are not a software developer, or user-interface designer, because you would not be particularly good at either job.
One of the software/UI designer’s most important jobs is to try and avoid designing things that place responsibilities on the user that the software itself could be handling for them in the first place. Another important part of good software design is anticipating how a user may make mistakes when using a particular application, and implementing ways to help them avoid making those mistakes in the first place, or at least recover from them intuitively when they do.
A common egregious example of this that I constantly run into on the web, are forms that tell you to enter your credit card number or phone number in a very specific format (e.g. 000-123-4567, and not (000) 123-4567). As someone who has developed such forms many times before, I get frustrated with this because if they are going through the trouble of running the user input through some sort of RegEx that checks to see if the input is in the proper format, then why don’t they just “normalize” the input to the format that they want it to be in when it gets input into the backend database, and not place that burden on the user?
You obviously cannot design for every possible situation where a user may make a mistake, but where certain types of “situations” are common errors that users frequently report, then considerations should be made regarding if the design of the problematic feature could be improved.
Telling users to “pay more attention”, instead of properly designing/redesigning the software in the first place, is only an appropriate attitude if you’re the type of arrogant developer who thinks they are doing the world a favor, and is too lazy and/or apathetic to care about useability and user-experience.
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