This book has been written by Matt Linderman and Jason Fried of 37signals. The premise of this book is: things go wrong at times no matter what. There are numerous ways to fill out a form with incorrect data, mistype a URL, or run a search which returns nothing. Can you foresee this happening and make sure you don’t hang visitors out to dry? Practice contingency design—design for when things go wrong.
Why “Defensive (Contingency) Design”?
The authors answer this question for you right in the introduction:
The title is inspired by the concept of defensive driving (that is, recognizing potential accident situations developing and taking advance measures to avoid them). The same way a driver must always be on the lookout for slick roads, reckless drivers, and other dangerous scenarios, site builders must constantly search for trouble sports that may cause visitors confusion and frustration. Good site can make or break a customer experience.
The book contains 40 guidelines to help hone your skills of early recognition and prevention of trouble spots in your web sites. This goes for meaningful, friendly and helpful error pages, data entry forms, search results, follow-up emails, and the like.
If you’ve been designing or coding for the web for a while, most of these things might be familiar to you, but once in a while you need a refresher. Yes, some of the guidelines just “make sense”. If fact, all of them “make sense”, yet this common sense still evades many web sites.
Human Face on Online Business
What Matt and Jason do is put a face on a site visitor, and stress time and time again: if you build web applications for people, then cater to people. Drop the techno babble and twisted language and communicate clearly.
Page not found? Instead of puzzling a person with “server object not found”, just say the page is missing and provide alternate links (check out my approach). An item is out of stock? Say so upfront and suggest when you’ll restock. Have an annoying animated ad which covers up content? Ditch it. Quit pissing people off. All those “little” things forge people’s opinions of your business.
Contingency Online and Offline
Some guidelines are about conducting business offline, i.e. via email. Does your company respond by email quickly and to the point? Are people, who can’t spell if their lives depended on it, endowed with the task of responding to emails?
Case in point.
Some time ago I emailed Ritz asking about a family travel package they were offering on their web site. Not only didn’t they list the fare accurately, but also forced people to email them to find out the child fare.
I spent 20 minutes composing an email and clearly stating my question about child fare, which travel “package” I was interested in, a thank-you-in-advance at the end, etc. Three days passed and I finally received an email from their rep. It was a one-liner (which I abhor), and all caps! Something along the lines of:
CHILD FARE 75% OF ADULT RATE
OLGA
First, I find it disrespectful of someone to write emails in all upper or lower case. It shows me that the person on the other end doesn’t have enough respect for me and can’t take a split second of his/her time to press Shift a few times. Typing ALL CAPS is like yelling at someone.
Second, the email had no thank-you, no greeting, nothing. It will be a cold day in hell before I decide to even go to Ritz’ web site again. Now that I told you about it the damage has multiplied a hundred-fold.
No Silver Bullet
Matt and Jason go over existing web sites pointing out their strengths and weaknesses. For example, eBay may suck at one trouble spot, but recover wonderfully at another. Other sites, be it Target, eBay, Orbitz, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Expedia, Nike, Yahoo!, Apple, etc, have their ups and downs too.
This means there’s always room for improvement, and what you need to do (in authors’ words) is prepare to fail:
Many companies are so focused on success that they ignore the reality of failure. To avoid this trap, create a culture that acknowledges that things will go wrong. Then, dedicate yourself to helping customers rebound when these troubles do occur.
Funny Twist
In a bit of a funny twist, Chapter 18 suggests the “Use ALT tags for images.” Heh, I know someone who gets all steamed up about it:
Dammit, it’s not an “alt tag”. I still can’t get over the fact we continue to say this! Talk about a pet peeve of mine. There is no such thing as an alt element, no such thing as an alt tag. What we’ve got is an alt attribute. If you’ve just spent too many years saying “alt tag” and can’t seem to break the rhythm, try saying “alt text” instead. It’s simply more accurate.
I’m not sure how this terminology slipped past the editorial reviews. :)
Recommended Reading
First and foremost, Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is a must-read for any web developer.
Another great companion to Defensive Design is Design of Sites: a comprehensive guide to a multitude of site design patterns. Design of Sites showcases existing web sites and highlights how they successfully implemented certain design patterns. Highly recommend.
