User Error v. Design Flaw
Clarissa Cutrell
Last week I built a page for our Police Department to introduce and explain their new online reporting system. I had information from the third party company, but wanted to rewrite and reorganize it to make it more scannable and easier to understand. I mean, if you just had your brand new electric bike stolen, would you be in the mood to read paragraphs of text just so you could report it to the police? Neither would I.
One of the important information points was a short, three-bullet checklist. Users of the reporting system should be able to read through and answer “yes” to each bullet point. One of the bullet points was, “This is NOT an emergency.” As I set up the checklist, it did occur to me how awkward the sentence sounded, which is why I put the “NOT” in all caps. I never put a WHOLE sentence in all caps, but the occasional word in all caps can be effective.
“That will fix it,” I thought, “People will see the ‘NOT’ and understand what we’re asking.” Ha! Classic content creator hubris.
Sure enough, when I showed the page to my PD colleague, he stumbled over that section.
“Let’s change ‘This is NOT an Emergency’ to ‘Is this an Emergency?’” he suggested. “I don’t know – it just reads weird in my head.”
“Problem is,” I messaged back, “We need all the answers to be ‘yes’ and we don’t want it to be an emergency.”
“Oh right,” he messaged back immediately, “That’s what I was doing wrong. Once I realized you were supposed to answer ‘yes’ it sounded better in my head so it was probably just me.”
I’m pretty sure an actual cartoon light bulb flicked on over my head in that moment.
“It was probably just me.” This is SO common. We humans are a humble lot (sometimes anyway—mostly when we shouldn’t be) and often give technology and designed systems the benefit of the doubt. “User error,” we say. “It’s probably just me.” And we brush it off with a self-effacing laugh.
More often than not, however, “user error” would be better defined as “designer error”.
This was a pretty easy problem to fix as far as design errors go. I went back and discovered that the instructions explaining you should be able to answer “yes” to each of the bulleted list items were below the list. Duh! I simply moved those instructions above the list and it was much clearer.
As a human doing the content creation, I’m prone to error myself. In this case, the instructions lacked clarity. Because I’d been buried in the content for the better part of the day, I just didn’t notice the issue. Perhaps in another situation, the work flow isn’t intuitive but the designer doesn’t catch it because she has been working in that flow for a week and it seems perfectly natural to her. When we are fully vested in our creations, it can be difficult to see their flaws. That’s why we must test and, even more important, be open to criticism. If I had ignored my PD colleague’s comment, I’m pretty sure the bullet point would have confused many more people than just him.
What isn’t an easy problem to fix is our tendency as humans to assume we’re the ones at fault when we don’t understand directions on a website or don’t understand how a piece of technology is supposed to work. As content designers, we are responsible for empathizing with users and creating content and technology that fits their needs—not the other way around. If a car has a ton of cool features but is so complicated that the average driver doesn’t understand how to access those features, it’s nothing more than a plain car. And a dangerous one at that (“Where are the freaking headlights?!”). That’s not user error. That’s all on the designer.
Design should be a collaboration between designer and user. When we forget that and selfishly design on our own terms, we’re just going to end up with a lot of confused and frustrated users.