UX is all about error prevention and recovery — oh, and feedback, too

When was the last time you saw someone celebrate after they flip a switch and the lights come on?

Have you ever seen a person give herself a high-five when water runs after she turn on the faucet?

User Experience, Information, and Usability Design are the most thankless professions around today.

Think about it. When was the last time you thanked a designer for a lovely or useful interface?

And as designers, we typically only get “feedback” about our work when things don’t work as intended. That’s right, it’s human nature to bellyache when you feel like our expectations aren’t being met.

We are so screwed

Our attention is as limited as our tolerance for stuff that doesn’t work. Most people who run into errors on our apps just move on to something else. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that we only actually hear about our terrible work when we’ve royally messed something up.

Testing is an obvious way to cut through most of would-be issues. But testing will only help you refine and correct the errors you can imagine. What about the…