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I look at this a little differently. If a user is able to make a mistake, I've failed (this is too broad, but you get the idea). If you take an honest look at

I look at this a little differently. If a user is able to make a mistake, I've failed (this is too broad, but you get the idea). If you take an honest look at your application, and step away from it, it's usually easy to see how they misinterpreted something, etc. I think empathy is an important skill in developing software. It's not right to expect someone to change how they think about a task, because you've written the software to work in that way. Good software and UX is hard. Modeling problems in a way a computer and a user can understand is hard. Browsing http://ux.stackexchange.com/ http://ux.stackexchange.com/ and reading some of "The Design of Everyday Things" opened my eyes to how bad things are - and how much better they can be. Also, if you haven't you should watch some talks by Bret Victor or Alan Kay.

joncampbelldev 10y ago
Totally agreed about the not letting mistakes be an option. I was building an admin ui to configure basically a fancy slideshow for employee performance metrics (gamification). We originally had planned a few days work to put proper validation and error messages in, but then flipped the task around and made it so that every field had a sensible default, and no mistaken values were possible to be filled in (e.g. number fields with automatic limits, date pickers instead of free text). It turned out to be much less work and the user never sees an annoying "hey you've not filled in this field in the way one of our devs wanted you to".
unabst 10y ago
> empathy is an important skill This. I get what the author of the article is experiencing and respect his process and conclusions (I empathize), but the one thing that bugs me is: >> Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance." ... which can be taken to mean users are, if not evil, just stupid. I sense a lack of empathy here. Could it be that your application just sucks? Maybe it's good or great, but from the details of the article it clearly seems like it was full of UI oversights and has potential for improvement. >> The issue was that I live and breath code, and they don't. This statement is telling, because code is absolutely irrelevant to the user and their experience. It would have been better if he claimed to breath UX not code, because his issues are with user experience, not code. This says more about his pride and his ego when it comes to his code, both which will only cause drama, which he admits to. >> So we all (including me) need to calm down. Yup.

joncampbelldev 10y ago

Totally agreed about the not letting mistakes be an option. I was building an admin ui to configure basically a fancy slideshow for employee performance metrics (gamification). We originally had planned a few days work to put proper validation and error messages in, but then flipped the task around and made it so that every field had a sensible default, and no mistaken values were possible to be filled in (e.g. number fields with automatic limits, date pickers instead of free text). It turned out to be much less work and the user never sees an annoying "hey you've not filled in this field in the way one of our devs wanted you to".

unabst 10y ago

> empathy is an important skill This. I get what the author of the article is experiencing and respect his process and conclusions (I empathize), but the one thing that bugs me is: >> Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance." ... which can be taken to mean users are, if not evil, just stupid. I sense a lack of empathy here. Could it be that your application just sucks? Maybe it's good or great, but from the details of the article it clearly seems like it was full of UI oversights and has potential for improvement. >> The issue was that I live and breath code, and they don't. This statement is telling, because code is absolutely irrelevant to the user and their experience. It would have been better if he claimed to breath UX not code, because his issues are with user experience, not code. This says more about his pride and his ego when it comes to his code, both which will only cause drama, which he admits to. >> So we all (including me) need to calm down. Yup.