The 3 questions you need to ask when you see users doing workarounds

User workarounds are often a great UX opportunity, if you can mitigate risk

Photo by Sean Foster on Unsplash

“Isn’t that technically…illegal?” I said as I watched users copy-paste sensitive medical information to work around a part of our application.

Work long enough in UX, especially doing UX Research, and you will see users doing workarounds for every shape and size.

In that particular example, it wasn’t illegal (but highly discouraged), and it turned out to be the most significant source of improvement in our re-design.

However, addressing this situation properly without repercussions can sometimes be tricky.

Protect the participant: The interface is stupid, not the user

This applies to user behavior more than you think

While I won’t get into specifics, the highly discouraged behavior involved a user saving “Personally Identifiable Information” on their desktop to copy-paste it into the form fields (as directly copying it into the application didn’t work).