Member-only story

Make Products Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly

Good user interface designs help users avoid and recover from errors. Why don’t all products do that?

Karl Wiegers
Analyst’s corner

A photo of a computer screen with a large warning dialog box that asks “Are you sure?”
Image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

I recently tried out some online life expectancy calculators to estimate my statistical expiration date. Many such calculators are simplistic, asking for just a few bits of data and then making a fuzzy guess. I found a more comprehensive calculator that requested no fewer than 35 pieces of information about my personal characteristics, family background, medical history, and lifestyle. The website provided drop-down lists so that I could select values for the many data items it requested. Nice.

However, the website did have one small user interface design problem, as this screenshot illustrates:

A screenshot of a user interface control that makes it too easy for the user to click on the wrong button.
It’s too easy to accidentally click on Reset instead of Calculate in this web form.

After entering all of my data, I went to click on the Calculate button to see how much longer I might be around. However, I accidentally hit the Reset button instead. As the screenshot shows, those two buttons are styled identically. They aren’t easy to read because of a medium-gray-on-light-gray-against-even-lighter-gray-background color scheme. Also, they…

Responses (4)

What are your thoughts?

Recommended from Medium

Lists

See more recommendations