VOICES
Opinion
PROFIL
EKarl Randay explains how you create a design that
works: create one that can fail
We are programmed to produce
things that will be perceived in the
best possible light. We want to create
objects that are as perfect in real life as
they appear in our imagination. In product
design, there’s also a lot of time spent
understanding the ‘ideal’ journey for
audiences and mapping the single, golden
path to each goal.
But this practice is a failure. It ignores the
single most incontrovertible fact of life: stuff
breaks. Even the most perfect designs must
incorporate the possibility of things going
wrong – otherwise, they’re incomplete.FAILURE AFFECTS ALL
FORMS OF DESIGN
While I’m going to focus on digital products,
the potential for failure is everywhere. From
finding your way around an airport toremembering all of your insurance details
in an emergenc y: e ver y thing is at some point
going to break and this is where its design is
relied upon the most.
In digital, there’s a huge chance of fai lure.
T he comple x it y of the products we create has
increased staggeringly. With this complexity
comes an increased chance of things going
wrong. And quite often it’s the things we’ve
desig ned that we fai l to anticipate break ing.
Take the age-old 404 error page. This is a
pet hate of mine and something that really
shouldn’t exist. Even the name is a failure,
exposing engineering terminology when the
solution could be so much more graceful.
There’s also the potential for human error.
It’s fai r to say i f something is going to break,
it’s most likely our fault. This could be due
to accessibility issues and an inability to
interact with something or that people hatefilling in forms, especially on mobile devices.
Accessibility, complexity, time restrictions
and information overload can all trip us up.PREPARE FOR FAILURE
Designing for failure starts with
understanding how to balance what you
want someone to do with the minimum
requirement for success. When you start
taking things away on the one side, you
need to know how you can still provide a
positive experience.
Having a clear picture of weak points and
dependencies is critical but so is humanising
what happens if (and when) these fail. Going
back to the 404 page, telling the user
something has gone wrong is just throwing
salt on the wound. Help them fig ure out what
to do next and provide useful links. We’re
able to tell a lot more about user intention
from current behaviour than ever before, so
developing a method for helping them
towards their goal is not bonkers. Showing
them a picture of a broken robot and saying
‘404 error’ is (we’re looking at you, Google).
Having said that, to be fair to Google, it is
at least heading in the right direction when
it comes to addressing some of these issues,
in that AI and machine learning will have a
lot to do with perfecting the failure
experience. Recent advancements with the
Google Duplex Assistant prove that an AI,
when presented with an unknown query on
a phone call, can seamlessly improvise to
ensure the service stays on ‘a’ track, even if
it’s not necessarily ‘the’ track.
But the most important aspect to consider
when designing for failure is still the user.
What is their goal, where are they, what
device are they using and what is their state
of mind? Often human input failure stems
from not utilising the right interaction design
for the right task.
Emotion is also a factor. Expecting your
user to fill in forms or follow a complicated
process when they have heightened anxiety
causes problems. So reduce complexity.
Adding additional layers of intricac y is of ten
about the fastest way to get something done,
not necessarily the cleverest.Randay is head of design at 383, the experience
design studio.
w: https://383project.com/DESIGN FOR
FAILURE
BUGS AND ERRORS