Today, I realize that design presents a fascinating interplay of technology and psychology, that the designers must understand both. Engineers still tend to believe in logic. They often explain to me in great, logical detail, why their designs are good, powerful, and wonderful. “Why are people having problems?” they wonder. “You are being too logical,” I say. “You are designing for people the way you would like them to be, not for the way they really are.” When the engineers object, I ask whether they have ever made an error, perhaps turning on or off the wrong light, or the wrong stove burner. “Oh yes,” they say, “but those were errors.” That’s the point: even experts make errors. So we must design our machines on the assumption that people will make errors.
A consistent theme in how we tend to think is that we will always try to “linearize” things and think along 1 single track of thought. It is just our natural bias to simplify things and we would always tend to the ideal case scenario.
In this case, we should always learn to plan for errors, mistakes for the users that we design products for. However, it is difficult to predict or forecast everything upfront. Sometimes, we just don’t know what we don’t know.
Simulation and testing helps. What we can do is always try to test iterations of a product and use that to learn more about the mental models of our users. Even then, each user would have their own interpretation of how things work. When designing a product, you can’t please everyone and at some point, you’ll just play the odds and work on the majority.
