Don't you hate when you know you've seen something but unable to find it again? I've been looking for the last two days for a review article for some mountain bike product. At least I think it was a mountain bike product, maybe it was some other kind of tech product. That's the problem, I don't recall enough of the details to resurface it.
Not that there wasn't anything particularly notable about the article except the author had willing accepted that some failure of the device was user error.
The idea of user error, that is, the user is at fault for some failure of the product, is one I've generally been fine with for some time. I know users are notorious for not reading instructions, not paying attention, and generally not thinking. While individuals are smart, "people" are often painfully dumb.
However, the term "user error" in day-to-day vernacular is a fairly new one, relatively speaking. Certainly when I was going through university, and even for much of my career, user error wasn't a thing. Now, user error is a common derisive term used to accuse someone of, or admit to, being too dumb to use any given product correctly.
Yet this review that I can't find, in which the author freely accepted that the product failing to do the thing it was supposed do was his fault, triggered me.
Our failure to use a product correctly, especially consumer products both physical or digital, all too often falls on our shoulders as users when it should far more often fall on those of the product. Yes, it's certainly possible that we are occasionally too dumb to use some products, I'm certainly ill-equipped to operate an MRI machine for instance, but our genuine ineptitude to use things is a far less common occurrence than it's made out to be.
Poor Design, Dark Patterns, and Gaslighting
Just this week I tried to change my log in email for Zoom.
Without exaggeration it must have taken me 15 minutes to find the right page in the admin panel to change the email address. Zoom has clearly forgotten that it's just a video call/conferencing platform. In its constant stair-climbing to make line go up it now thinks it needs to give us AI, whiteboards, file storage, and whatever other nonsense "value adds" that add little value and we can't opt out of. In doing so, the admin panel is a bloated, hot mess of dead-ends and circular links that don't lead to changing my log in email.
As it turns out, of the dozens of pages within settings, there is a page that provides you the option to change your email. However, depending on how you navigate to this page, the option to change the email address is available or hidden* (with the little eye icon to show, yet clicking to show the email address doesn't allow you to change it). Whether this page is the same page with the email presented differently depending on how you arrive there, or there are two near-identical looking pages, I don't know. I didn't stick around to figure this out. And Zoom is one of the better offerings in this space.
The experience was deeply aggravating, and just one example where something should be easy, yet trying to perform the basic task is anything but.
This isn't user error. This is poor design.
Yet today's culture leads us to believe that these failures are our own. That we're too incompetent to use these products as their creator intended. That somehow we are to blame.
Nor do I think it's any accident that our new-found propensity to user error coincides with an increase in dark patterns and the general enshittification of all products we use. We've been led to think our inability to cancel our subscription is user error, and not a deliberate design choice to keep us paying.
As users, we have been gaslit into believing the fault is ours.
It's about time we reject the notion.
Usability Error, not User Error
On the flip side, for designers blaming user error is a lazy way to dismiss poor design. Instead of rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard work to make a design more intuitive and less confusing, we can far more easily point the finger at the user and tell them they're holding it wrong.
In regulated industries where a risk-based approach to product development is mandated, how a user uses your product isn't their responsibility, it's yours.
That means that if the user does or doesn't do something that increases the risk to themselves or a patient, or any other stakeholder, you need to do something about it. Not after the fact (like throwing in a free case), but as part of the development process.
In medical devices there's a whole field of usability engineering. Building prototypes and testing them with real users; observing how they behave and then improving the design. Usability studies are an integral part of the design process. While this is predominately to ensure how they use the device doesn't cause any unintended risk, it has the beneficial side-effect of making your product fundamentally better.
I bang on a lot on this blog about user needs, so I'm not going to do it again here. As designers it's drilled into us that we must gather user needs, understand context, etc etc. What is not drilled into us is that if a user uses your product wrong, that's not their fault. Your design needs work.
Sunk Cost
Of course part of our reluctance to improve our design to mitigate usability errors is the costs we've already sunk into our design. If we're already well down the path of creating concepts, developing prototypes, getting buy-in from stakeholders etc, to make a change that corrects usability flaws can mean tossing out all that work.
Further, as we meander down the development path, we collect our own emotional baggage. The design choices we make as we go, for whatever reasons make sense to us at the time, mean that we become attached to our design. When it fails to deliver in the ways we hoped it would, that makes us defensive and sometimes stubborn to change. It's easier just to claim user error and carry on.
However, the sunk cost fallacy holds true. Just because you've invested your time and money into developing your product to whatever stage it is doesn't you're not better off cutting your losses and starting over.
That's not to say that financial and emotional costs in changing a design can't be mitigated. Instead, have users start using your product, or prototype, as soon as possible. The rougher the prototype and the sooner, the better. This will make changing the design for the better far less painful now, or far less painful for the user later.
* As an aside, why they felt the need to hide the log in email address here makes absolutely no sense. I'm literally logged in as admin and have total access. Not to mention, the user email addresses are readily visible in many other areas of the settings.
