Errors are a habitual and eternally ingrained part of daily life, even in day to day conversation people um, ah and stumble on their words, and this commonality is found just as frequently in our interaction with technology. However, unlike our brains that detect and quickly resolve any biological errors, machines don’t currently have this ability, so it’s up to us as designers to ensure that these errors occur as infrequently as possible, and when they do, they are easy to recover from, so in order to design for them, let’s understand a bit more about three common categories of error.

Misconceptions

What are Misconceptions?

Misconceptions happen daily, sometimes we’re simply naive about the world around us, and sometimes we think we’re a little bit smarter than we truly are, but either way, these cause friction in our experience.

Our formation of mental models sometimes fails to match up to the actual, real application of something; let’s say for example the age old turning the oven dial to hotter makes it heat up quicker — obviously this isn’t true, however quite a large number of people do it anyway.

Designing for Misconceptions

The importance in misconceptions is the gap in correspondence between the cause & effect; What I mean by this if we use the oven example, is that there’s no clear indicator that dialling it up to maximum wouldn’t make it quicker, after all most ovens don’t display the current temperature, but rather the target temperature — however, wouldn’t displaying the current temperature quickly resolve any curiosity the user may have about the time it takes for the oven to reach its target temperature? Whilst this example may not instantly satisfy the users preconceived mental model, it provides a basis for bridging the correspondence and allowing the possibility for misconceptions to be lowered.

Misunderstandings

What are Misunderstandings?

In terms of error, the simplest way to define misunderstanding is when an event occurs, and the user incorrectly attributes it to an action, usually one they have just taken. Let’s say you pressed close on spotify, and you’re greeted with the blue crash screen all windows users dread, a typical first thought might be ‘did closing spotify have something to do with that?’, you could also call this coincidence. However, when we turn the focus onto users rather than systems, a user may assume that a detrimental effect was caused by them or by their lacking knowledge of the system, rather than because of coincidence & poor design.

Designing for Misunderstandings

A lot of users assume their ineptitude when it comes to certain pieces of software and interfaces, however it’s simply not true — the root problem is usually down to poor engineering, or poor design. You might be one of the few who can fix both issues, but as a designer I focus on understanding the design. In essence the simplest route to solving the errors that arise from misunderstanding (and a whole host of others) is to design with simplicity in mind. Understanding designing for simplicity will unlock the next level of UX Design for you, but it’s important to understand the visual and technical elements of simplicity — it doesn’t just mean minimal! You can read a bit more about this below

In Summary

Errors span far and wide in the world of UX — you could spend the entire day exploring the various categories, as well as the causes, and hopefully this quick article gave you a bit of valuable insight into the world of error design in User Experience!

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