All That Glitters Is Not Gold

a.k.a. Usability Design for "When Things Go Wrong"

Preface

• I love Graphic Designers

• This talk started out of frustration

• Thank you

Image from James Petts - https://www.flickr.com/photos/14730981@N08/11930527256

Iron Pyrite

• a.k.a. Fool’s Gold

• Looks pretty

• Initial Perceived Value

• Not much you can do with it in the real world

A Good User Experience:

• Delivers value to the user

• Reduces effort to get the job done

• Is invisible

• Just works

• But what if it doesn’t?

The Real World is Messy

• Things break

• Failures Happen

• Let’s Accept It. Not Fight It

Mistaeks We’re Made• Designing for the happy path

• Static Assets

• PowerPoint/Keynote

• Animations (if lucky)

• “Nobody thought about that”

• “That would never happen”

Kind of Failures• Net-Split

• Bandwidth

• Latency

• Site is “Unresponsive”

• Dependent Service Down?

• Others*

* http://rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf

Who You Gonna Call?

No Really… Who You Gonna Call?

Your User Doesn’t Care

• It is on you, not a service provider

• How can you still deliver value when things go wrong?

• This is where the user’s experience really begins

“Okay. Failures Happen…”

Start Getting Out Of The Hole

Or, we can’t fix the problem, so how do we make it less intrusive

Provide Some Levity• Be Helpful when the user messed up

• Github 404 pages

Provide Some Levity• Be Helpful when the user messed up

• Github 404 pages

• erlang.org’s not found page

Provide Some Levity• Acknowledge you messed up (and apologize)

• Twitter Fail Whale

• Reddit down time messages*

* https://github.com/reddit/error-pages/blob/876f3e689206551722fbe77374e7739f54b52847/504.reallydown.html#L152

Make It A Game???• Track how many times they have failed

• Give them “rewards” for failures

• Real, or emotional

• DOOM faces?

• Give them something to be grateful about

• People can’t be grateful and upset at the same time

The “Harder” Wins

Can one failure take out your entire system?

Can one failure take out your entire system?

• How can we isolate that part of the system?

• Can we safely restart it from scratch?

• Is it critical to the entire system?

• No, really, is it critical to the entire system?

• Can we work without it until it gets better?

• Do we have different, and unrelated, way of getting that information?

• Can we provide “The Next Best Thing”?

Partial / Reduced Functionality

• Netflix

• Streaming

• vs Personal Recommendations

• vs Top Rated

• vs Queue/Watchlist Management

Partial / Reduced Functionality

• Amazon

• Orders

• vs “Customers Also Bought”

• vs Inventory

• vs Ratings

• vs Reviews

Predictive User Experience?

Automated Assistance?• Analyze Event Streams and Analytics

• Common user behavior

• Uncommon behavior for a specific user

• Can we helpfully take control on behalf of the user

• Assisted driving

• Don’t let the user mess up

What if “Everything” is unavailable??

Network is “down”• Airplane mode

• International Travel

• Local ISP is having issues

• Bandwidth throttling

• Local network is down

Network is “down”• Natural disasters

• Backhoes

• Backhoes 💖 datacenters

• Cleaning Crews

• That one server under the desk

Full Offline Mode Support

• Evernote

• Your calendar

• Home thermostat

More Than Just Web(site|app)s

Internet of Things

• Televisions / Home Electronics

• Lightbulbs / Door locks / Toilets

• RFID Inventory

• Oil Pipeline Sensors

Multiple Sensor Devices• What happens when one fails?

• Scary Time…

• Planes

• Cars

• Medical Devices

Distributed Systems

–Leslie Lamport

“There has been considerable debate over the years about what constitutes a distributed system. It would appear that the following

definition has been adopted at SRC:

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can

render your own computer unusable.”

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/distributed-system.txt

Self Healing / Regenerative

• How can I know that something is wrong?

• What is supervising/monitoring this?

• Can I safely “turn it off and on again”?

• Can this all be invisible to the user?

Usability Design ↓

Systems Thinking

–Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

“Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing

interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static

“snapshots.””

–Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility,

randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”

Usability Design Involves Everyone

Call to ActionStart thinking about these things.

Ask how things can break.

You might not be doing anything “critical” at this point of your career.

But you never know what the future holds for you

(or one of your coworkers).

Where to find me

• @stevenproctor

• https://www.proctor-it.com

• https://www.functionalgeekery.com

• https://www.github.com/stevenproctor

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-proctor