Usability Characteristic: "Error Tolerant"

Error Tolerant User Interface.

Your site/application ideally needs to prevent user errors and provide easy means to recover from them if they occur. This characteristic is also far too critical to be ignored or taken lightly. For achieving this, your current site or application may need a strong revamp, focusing on all critical tasks and paths of the user; the steps involved; the language used; alternate and recovery paths available; error message structuring; guiding tips and instructions; memory features; and so on. Basically, everything that makes the intended audience to explore and make optimum use, without fear - about loss of time and effort.

An error-free system, while being the ultimate desire, is far from being a reality. It may be far more usable, if the system considers comprehensible error-messages as part of its user interface, and with possible inclusion of a clear description and direct links to correct the problems. Some guidelines based on Whitney Quesenbery's theory and research, to make your interface error-tolerant are:

• Make it difficult to take incorrect actions; Design links and buttons to be distinctive, use clear language, avoid technical jargon, and make dependent and relevant fields appear together


• Make it difficult to take invalid actions; Limit user choices, provide clear examples for data entry, present appropriate navigation options


• Make it difficult to take irreversible actions; Provide back-tracking capability, provide undo/redo, avoid dead screens, don't indiscriminately use confirmations


• Plan for the unexpected; Allow user to add new entries, take exceptional routes through the interface, make choices you did not predict

It is important for the interface to be polite about correcting mistakes that typical arise from lack of foresight - that of the designer/developer.

I'm hunting for some good examples to add to this post, as done in my previous features. Feel free to contribute if you have any thoughts and suggestions. I'll update this feature with examples, very soon.

Next Characteristic: Easy To Learn.