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 recommendations that will help you improve the user experience of signup and logging process.

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 recommendations that will help you improve the user experience of signup and logging process.

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How might we design user interfaces that help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors?

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How might we design user interfaces that help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors?

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DPDS1 CA1A – UX Topic Research & Seminar

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- Articulate design concepts verbally with precise clarity

- Apply design principles to digital products in our everyday lives

- Demonstrate application of design principles through an activity

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Great products are dependent upon great user experiences. To ensure the best experience for users, a heuristic evaluation is performed to help identify issues within a digital product. One of the most popular sets of principles used to evaluate a system are Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design. This article will focus on the ninth one of these principles which is Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors. If you missed the eighth one, please click here.

Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.

Good designs should aim to prevent errors from ever occurring in the first place, but sometimes this goal just isn't realistic. To best meet the needs of users, designs must also provide ways for users to overcome any errors they encounter when interacting with the system. This can be achieved three different ways. First, users should be informed of errors so they can recognize they made one. Second, the system should diagnose the error for the user by telling them in plain, easy to understand language what went wrong. Third, the user should be given clear directions on how to recover from the error.

Recognize

The most straightforward way to inform a user of an error is to use an error message. This can be achieved with text alone or with text that is accompanied by a visual cue like a red X for example. The error message must be highly noticeable and visible to the user.

Upon login, Pinterest will inform the user if they enter an email address that is not associated with a Pinterest account. They do this using red lettering which is a good signal for most, but for the color blind user, it doesn't help much. Mailchimp goes a step further by adding a visual element to the red highlighted text on their error message. This helps the user to recognize the error even better.

Diagnose

The error message must use simple language when describing the problem to the user. Errors should be presented in everyday language, not using code or jargon. The language should also be precise in describing the problem while remaining gentle and non-condemning to the user. The message needs to go beyond just stating that there has been an error. It needs to describe the problem that occured. A common example of this can be seen in the 404 error message.

Google gives users the traditional 404 message when entering a Google URL that doesn't exist on the server. They are cute and honest and say, "That's all we know." The branding agency FreshSparks goes beyond the standard 404 message by giving the user some suggested links to guide the user to other content.

Recover

Designs need to help users recover from errors by providing actionable ways to fix them. Advice should always be detailed and constructive. The best way to do this is to give the user instructions as well as shortcuts within the error itself so they can recover from the error immediately. Users must be given a way to fix mistakes they make while interacting with a system.

One of the most common ways of allowing users to recover from errors is to provide the user with an undo or back button. Internet browsers have back and forward buttons for this purpose. Many types of applications including word processors like Google Docs feature an undo and redo button so users stay in control of their interactions.

In order to provide users with the best user experience possible, they need to be given ways to recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors. These error messages should be highly visible, easy to understand, constructive, and actionable when appropriate. The guidance of good error messages help users to stay on track and out of trouble which leads to a better overall user experience.

Thanks for reading! I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts about this topic in the comments.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to UX Para Minas Pretas (UX For Black Women), a Brazilian organization focused on promoting equity of Black women in the tech industry through initiatives of action, empowerment, and knowledge sharing. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.

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Jakob Nielsen's ninth usability heuristic for user interface design

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Great products are dependent upon great user experiences. To ensure the best experience for users, a heuristic evaluation is performed to help identify issues within a digital product. One of the most popular sets of principles used to evaluate a system are Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design.

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Most Common UX Design Methods and Techniques

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Most Common UX Design Methods and Techniques

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Illustration by Wren Sauer

The list below contains most common methods and techniques used by UX Designers as they create great experiences for users. For each item on the list you'll see additional links with some of the best practices available.

Let's start!

A statement that maps out the key aspects of product: what it is, who it is for and how it will be used. Value proposition helps the team create consensus around what the product will be.

A thought value proposition help UX designers to keep the focus in the important things Image credit: UXMag

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Strategyzer's Value Proposition Canvas Explained

A user experience strategy applies this approach to UX design. Image credit: UIE

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Awesome talk by Jared Spool about building a winning UX strategy using Kano Model

Summary of competitive audit. Image by boxesandarrows

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A product strategy is the foundation of a product life-cycle and the execution plan for further development. It allows UX designers to zero in on specific target audiences and draw focus on the product and consumer attributes.

Cultural probes use a collection of tools, artifacts and tasks intended to provoke the user to look and think about their environment in new ways.
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Competitive Audit is a comprehensive analysis of competitor products that maps out their existing features in a comparable way. The goal of competitive audit is to discover what is working for other companies in your industry, so that you can make those strategies work for you, too, to gain a competitive advantage.
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Cultural probes is a technique used to inspire ideas in a design process. It serves as a means of gathering inspirational data about people's lives, values and thoughts. With minimal intrusion, researchers can glean insights into participants' environments that can help to identify problem statements, uncover new opportunities, and inspire the designer with new ideas and novel solutions.

Usually, a researcher meets with participants one-on-one to discuss in depth what the participant thinks about the topic in question.

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Stakeholder Interviews are conversations UX designers conducts with their key stakeholder: customers, bosses, subordinates or peers both within and outside the organization. The interviews allow UX designer to step into the shoes of their interviewees and see your role through the eyes of these stakeholders. It also helps prioritise features and define key performance indicators (KPIs).

A kickoff meeting is the first meeting with the project team and the client of the project. Image credit: 1stwebdesigner

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A user interview is a common user research technique used typically to get qualitative information from existing users. User interview helps UX designer better understand their users (user's emotion and opinions). This technique is especially useful when the target audience is new or unknown for the team.

A radar plot showing a website that performs well across all heuristic categories. Image credit: Smashing Magazine

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The kickoff meeting covers a high-level outline of the product's purpose, who is involved in designing and developing the product, how they'll work together and stay up to date on progress, and what the intended results or success metrics are. The kickoff meeting sets the stage for the success of your product.

Brainstorming is a process for generating creative ideas and solutions through intensive and freewheeling group discussion.

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Heuristic Evaluation is a detailed analysis of a product that highlights good and bad design practices in existing product. It helps UX designers visualize the current state of the product in terms of usability, accessibility, and effectiveness of the experience.

Task analysis is a simple and effective process for laying out tasks from a user's perspective. Image credit: Comcast

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Brainstorming is widely used by teams as a method to generate ideas and solve problems. Brainstorming allows the team to visualize a broad range of design solutions before deciding which one to stick with.
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A study of the actions required in order to complete a given task. Task Analysis is helpful when designers and developers try to understand the current system and its information flows. It makes it possible to allocate tasks appropriately within the new system.
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Product roadmap is a product's evolution plan with prioritized features. It could be a spreadsheet, a diagram or even a bunch of sticky notes. UX designer shares the product strategy with the team and the road that needs to be taken to achieve its vision.
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A focus group is a moderated discussion that typically involves 5 to 10 participants. You bring people to discuss issues and concerns about the features of a user interface. The group typically lasts about 2 hours and is run by a moderator who maintains the group's focus.
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Card sorting is a method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a product. UX designer asks users to group content and functionalities into open or closed categories. A result gives UX designer input on content hierarchy, organization and flow.
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Usability testing is the observation of users trying to carry out tasks with a product. Testing can be focused on a single process or be much more wide ranging.

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A UX researcher shares an approximation of a product that captures the key essence (the Value Proposition) of a new concept in order to determine if it meets the needs of the target audience. Concept testing can be done one-on-one or with larger numbers of participants, and either in person or online.
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A/B testing is offering alternative versions of a product to different users and comparing the results in order to find out which one performs better. This is a great technique for optimizing funnels and landing pages.
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Guerrilla testing is one of the simplest (and cheapest) form of user testing. Using guerrilla testing usually means going into a coffee shop or another public place to ask people there about your product or prototype. It can be conducted anywhere ex- cafe, library, train station etc, essentially anywhere where you can find a relevant audience.

Eye-tracking heatmaps

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Field study is about going out and observing users "in the wild" so that behavior can be measured in the context where a product will actually be used. This technique can include ethnographic research, interviews and observations, plus contextual enquiry.
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A technology that analyzes the user's eye movements across the UI layout (i.e. web page). Eyetracking provides data about what keeps users interested on the screen and how their reading flow could be optimized by design.

The end goal, in both usability and accessibility, is to discover how easily people can use a product and feed that information back into improving future designs and implementations. Image credit: Sarah Horton

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Various methods for assessing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that impact the user experience of a product.

A study to measure if the website can be used by everyone, including users with special needs. It should follow the W3C guidelines to make sure that all users are satisfied.

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Most Common UX Design Methods and Techniques

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The list below contains most common methods and techniques used by UX Designers as they create great experiences for users. For each item on the list you'll see additional links with some of the best practices available. Let's start!

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Summary: No. 9 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to write error messages that help users understand the problem and to provide information that constructively teaches users how to recover from the error.

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Usability Heuristic 9: Help Users Recognize, Diagnose and Recover from Errors (Video)

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Summary: No. 9 of the top 10 UX design heuristics is to write error messages that help users understand the problem and to provide information that constructively teaches users how to recover from the error. You must have javascript and cookies enabled in order to display videos.

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10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design

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Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design. They are called “heuristics” because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.

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Heuristic Evaluation: How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

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Heuristics are general guidelines, principles, or rules of thumb that you use to inform and evaluate your work. Let’s look at these guidelines and how they can help evaluate your work.