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I work on the development at small web applications during the day. Most of the time they’re intended for a broad audience that will only be using the system every now and then. As a result, we design for failure and prompt users often when they try and do things that we want to be positive that they want to do. Unfortunately you can’t use that strategy all the time. This became apparent recently.

One of the tools we recently built was to be used fairly regularly by a single person. After they had used the application for some time one of their main concerns was that the constant prompting with “are you sure” screens was slowing them down significantly. It only then dawned on me that we had completely missed the target on who would be using the system.

My favourite comparison is to knives. You only want to give guests in a restaurant knives that are as sharp as what they need to cut. However the chefs in the restaurant will want the sharpest knives they can get their hands on. Knives that would likely injure a person badly if accidentally misused. You don’t want to expose the guests (your infrequent users) to that level of risk for the slight improvement in performance. Since the chefs use the knives all the time, that slight improvement in performance multiplies. The risk is well worth it to them.

So even when you think you know what you’re doing, it never hurts to go back to users to see how things are working for them. Don’t forget the major profile differences between expert users and casual users.

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