User Testing
Reference material: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, Chapter 5
Chapter five of The Design of Everyday Things opens up by criticizing the idea of assigning blame to “human error.” Norman claims that workplace accidents, when ruled as “human error,” are never truly the fault of the humans. Sometimes the workers that are “at fault” even say they messed up or “knew better,” but Norman claims that many times, the workers are not truly at fault, but the designers of the systems they are operating are.
A common colloquialism for designing systems to make sure people can’t mess things up that I’ve heard is “idiot-proofing.” Though crude, the concept of designing a system that is resilient to human error is a good idea. However, I think that just resilience isn’t enough to design good systems. Not only should a system try to withstand human error, but the system should also be designed to be intuitive enough so that humans don’t error in the first place. Of course, that’s not always possible, but the goal of the designer should be to constantly improve the system and learn from iterations in pursuit of that goal.
So how does a designer build a resilient and intuitive system? In the readings discussed in the blog posts on this website, there have been a multitude of different concepts discussed about general rules to follow while designing a system. Systems that don’t make a user think that much to accomplish a task are usually better, and these sort of systems employ different spatial reasoning techniques to guide the user through tasks in the system. Buttons that are close to their functions indicate that they are linked. Similarly colored things are often linked as well. The list goes on, but following all the rules and guidelines is not always enough.
The trouble with designing is that every design must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis, since each design has different functions or different target audiences. Because of this, the best way to design systems so that they are both resilient and intuitive is to iterate and test the systems with users in a controlled environment.