Designing for the worst case scenario

photo credit: versageek

It is time for another web development versus web design pondering. Yesterday Cleve asked me quite intriguing question: do I as a web developer get web designs that are designed for the worst case scenario?

What is worst case scenario for a web site? Take a login form. Does the design I get provides information on what should happen after user will provide invalid login information? How about search query? How are we going to act on a situation when there is zero search results? My personal favorite: 404 page. Never got designs for “ups, something went wrong page”.

Why is that happening? Why do designs don’t want to cover the simplest scenarios for users screwing up the input? Answer is quite simple come to think of it: lack of proper web flow analysis. 

Thing is quite simple: if somewhere at the beginning of the design process someone would create web flow diagram it would be so much easier to avoid this mistake of not providing designs for worst case scenarios. Think about it like this: when you are working only on “one page at a time” basis you take this page (the design) out of context. What needs be done is: take the particular use case (a scenario if you will, for instance “user wants to create an account”) and design having the whole process in mind. Chances are you will think about situations when user would input existing user name. And if so then you (and by you I mean “the designer”) will incorporate solution to that problem in the design itself.

Sounds so simple doesn’t it? But adds additional work. Designer needs to think about web flow when creating the designs. If not then we (the developers) will end up with bunch of pages designed for “an ideal user(tm)” that is just an urban legend and there haven’t been reported sightings of that mythical creature since 1996.

Now over to you. Do you have any experience with good designs providing answers to the question “what to do when things go wrong”? Or maybe you have similar experiences as I do and see only sites designed on the premise that everything will be just fine?