"To me, error analysis is the sweet spot for improvement"
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Donald Norman, the champion of human-centered design, treats errors not as personal failings but as signals from a system that does not match human cognition. Successes rarely tell designers what to fix; errors do. They reveal where mental models diverge from interface behavior, where mappings are confusing, where feedback is delayed or absent, and where constraints fail to guide action. That is why the richest insights live in the study of what went wrong: the sweet spot where observation turns directly into improvement.
Norman distinguishes between slips and mistakes. A slip happens when the goal is right but the execution goes awry, often because the interface invites the wrong action or hides the right one. A mistake occurs when the goal itself is misformed, usually because the system misleads the user or presents a poor conceptual model. Error analysis asks which kind is happening, under what conditions, and why. The answer points to concrete adjustments: better visibility and mapping, clearer signifiers, stronger constraints, informative feedback, and recovery paths that make correction easy rather than punitive.
Consider the infamous Norman door: a handle that affords pulling on a door that requires pushing. When people pull and fail, the event is not proof of clumsiness; it is evidence of misleading design. Study the error, redesign the handle or signage, and the failure rate collapses. The same logic scales from doors to dashboards, medical devices, and software. Usability tests, log data, and blameless postmortems transform errors and near misses into design requirements, yielding resilient systems that anticipate failure modes and make them safe.
Framed this way, error is not the opposite of success but the shortest path to it. By treating human error as a design problem and making error analysis a routine part of iteration, teams learn faster, build empathy, and produce artifacts that fit human thought and action. Improvement follows naturally from understanding precisely how and where people stumble.
Norman distinguishes between slips and mistakes. A slip happens when the goal is right but the execution goes awry, often because the interface invites the wrong action or hides the right one. A mistake occurs when the goal itself is misformed, usually because the system misleads the user or presents a poor conceptual model. Error analysis asks which kind is happening, under what conditions, and why. The answer points to concrete adjustments: better visibility and mapping, clearer signifiers, stronger constraints, informative feedback, and recovery paths that make correction easy rather than punitive.
Consider the infamous Norman door: a handle that affords pulling on a door that requires pushing. When people pull and fail, the event is not proof of clumsiness; it is evidence of misleading design. Study the error, redesign the handle or signage, and the failure rate collapses. The same logic scales from doors to dashboards, medical devices, and software. Usability tests, log data, and blameless postmortems transform errors and near misses into design requirements, yielding resilient systems that anticipate failure modes and make them safe.
Framed this way, error is not the opposite of success but the shortest path to it. By treating human error as a design problem and making error analysis a routine part of iteration, teams learn faster, build empathy, and produce artifacts that fit human thought and action. Improvement follows naturally from understanding precisely how and where people stumble.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
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