"You know that feeling when you're deep in a design & everything just clicks! You lean back, admire your work, & think - " This is good. This is really good! " And suddenly, something strikes & you start worrying..! I was designing a feature that looked absolutely perfect. Clean interface. Intuitive layout. The kind of design that makes you want to screenshot it for your portfolio!"
"Then I did something, I should have done hours earlier - I actually used it! I clicked through the prototype like a real user would. Followed the happy path. Then the unhappy path. Then the "what if the user is distracted & clicks the wrong thing" path. And that's when I saw it. The entire flow was broken! Not broken in an obvious way. Not broken in a "the button doesn't work" way. Broken in a much more insidious way - It relied on users remembering to do something manually!"
A designer created a feature with a clean interface and intuitive layout that felt portfolio-ready. The prototype was then used like a real user would be used: clicked through the happy path, the unhappy path, and a distracted-user path where wrong clicks occur. That hands-on testing revealed a hidden flaw: the flow depended on users remembering to perform a manual step. The flaw did not break UI elements, but created an insidious usability failure that could cause real users to get stuck. Realistic, error-tolerant testing exposed the risk and the need to design for memoryless user behavior.
Read at Medium
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