Stopping the blame game: not human error but system error

Preventing human error with better designed technology

Recently, I moved to a new apartment with a gas stove in the kitchen. The stove works great, but whenever I use it, I almost always make the same mistake. I turn on the wrong burner. The problem I have is that I can’t tell immediately which control corresponds to which burner.

Gas stove and controls that lead to the same mistake or human error
This stove doesn’t make it easy to tell which control corresponds to which burner, often leading to the same mistake or human error: turning on the wrong burner.

Ultimately, I have to bend down and look at the labels to remind myself which control to use. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made the same mistake. Often, this kind of a mistake is known as a human error. However, in the field of user experience (UX)—a profession that studies how to design user-friendly technology—the term human error may be somewhat of a misnomer.

Is a mistake really human error, or is it system error?

Cognitive scientist Don Norman, one of the pioneers of the UX profession, talks about what’s wrong with referring to such mistakes as human error. To quote from his classic book, The Design of Everyday Things:

The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably.

Unfortunately, Norman argues, there’s a serious problem with this kind of thinking. It’s that—in the words of poet Alexander Pope—to err is human. As Norman goes on to explain:

But in my experience, human error is usually the result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else (Norman, 2013, p 66).

Prevent human error with designs that accommodate people

In sum, when people tend to make the same mistake over and over again while using technology, it doesn’t always make sense just to blame that mistake on human error. It makes more sense to design the technology so that it intuitively makes sense to the people using it. In other words, technology should accommodate people—not vice versa.

In UX, designing technology to accommodate people in this way is known as user-centered design. To illustrate, let’s conclude by returning to the stove example. Surely, it would make more sense to design the stove so that it’s obvious which control corresponds to which burner.

Two stove designs
Two possible stove designs, one where it isn’t obvious which control corresponds to which burner, and the other where it is much more obvious (de la Fuente et al., 2015).

References

de la Fuente, Javier, Gustafson, Stephanie, Twomey, Colleen, and Bix, Laura. (2015). An Affordance-Based Methodology for Package Design. Packaging Technology and Science, 28. 157–171. doi.org/10.1002/pts.2087.

Norman, Don. (2013.) The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Basic Books. Read book synopsis.

 

Leave a Comment