Mr Leong 梁先生

[The post was initially posted on MoVend Blog]

As a developer, I have to make multiple decisions everyday. When making a trade-off, there hardly is any right or wrong. Over time, the team develops core values, which act as guidelines for decision making. These guidelines then help the team members to make consistent decisions, allowing us to work effectively as a whole.

“How can I prevent, or make it difficult for a user to make a mistake?” This is one of the many questions I ask myself whenever I am designing an interface (UI and API). I use it as a guideline for making decisions. In order to achieve an objective (e.g. make a payment), the user has to perform a series of actions through interaction with the UI. When a user makes a mistake, he/she may be frustrated because the objective is not achieved. One method of circumventing this problem is to limit to only 1 possible way of performing a task. When there is only 1 possible way to perform a task, you can easily design a UI that guides user’s interaction. By reducing the possibility of making a mistake, user achieves the objective easily and fuss-free, coding then becomes easier as user action validation is simpler.

Limiting ways of performing a task is just one of the various implementation of preventing users from making mistakes. So then, how do you make it difficult for a user to make a mistake? Feel free to share your experience in the comments section.