100 Things: Every Designer Needs to Know About People

85. People Will Always Make Mistakes; There is No Fail-Safe Product

I collect computer error messages. It’s kind of a hobby. Some of them date back to the old character-based computer screens. Most of them weren’t trying to be humorous; they were written by computer programmers who were trying to explain what was going wrong. But many of them end up being quite funny, and some of them intentionally so. My favorite was from a company in Texas. When there was a “fatal” error, meaning the system was going to crash, a message came up that said, “Shut ‘er down Henry, she’s spewin’ up mud!”

Assume that Something Will Go Wrong

The reality is that something always goes wrong: a user makes a mistake in working with a computer, or a company releases software ...