30 May 2007 0408H

Edge cases in interaction design

thanks to punchstock

Designing for edge cases takes a lot of time out of the design process, but we don’t have personas to design scenarios around this time. We have a state about which we don’t have any prior body of data or knowledge except our own collective experience and competitive analysis.

Of course we can begin with interaction design and process flow patterns, such as you might find in Van Duyne, Landay and Hong’s very good The Design of Sites, 2nd Ed. but the interaction design/process flow pattern is only a starting point, and does not go into the edge cases, where 90% of the effort typically goes.

Had I to do this particular job all over again, I think we could have designed for the desired state first, which our client Steve likes to call the “happy path”, and then gone through with the client, where we could enumerate, like the thousand names of Vishnu, all the multitudinous ways it can be broken or deviated from, and these could have been grouped into various affinity groups or paths for scenarios: taking for example the commonly known online checkout process, you might have something we’d call the path of the guest user, the path of the user who has had a CSR create a startup account for them, the path of the user who has a loyalty program card which is not linked to the account, ad nauseam. Then they could have been laid out and themselves tested for breakability. At that point those paths actually could have been focused upon separately allowing the work to continue focused and unabated and leaving the necessary discussion devoted at that time and that time only to those paths.

Probably would have helped to have started with a review of what the platform does out of box, but when it comes to design time that type of knowledge is architectural and some of the details we’re looking for are quite granular, so, probably we could have compiled a list of questions and passed it to the architect or tech lead for answering.

At least, that’s the way it plays out in my mind.

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