Getting Started With Defensive Web Design

The following artile is brought to you courtesy of: Smashingmagazine.com via: Ian Lurie

Nothing ruins a great website UI like people using it. At least, it often feels that way. You put in days or weeks building the interface, only to find that a vast majority of visitors abandon it partway through the process that it supports. Most of the time, visitors leave because they’ve hit a roadblock: a problem that lets them go no further. They typed their credit card number wrong or clicked the wrong link or mistyped a URL. And it’s not their fault.

What exactly is meant by defensive design? Image by Richard Winchell

A good design assumes that people make mistakes. A bad one leaves visitors stuck at a dead end because they mistyped one character. The best professionals account for this with smart, defensive design strategies (also known as contingency design).

Defensive Design Means…

I’m a simple guy. In the book Defensive Design for the Web, 37Signals defines defensive design as such: “Design for when things go wrong.”

Gets right to the point, doesn’t it? Defensive design anticipates both user and website error. Then, it tries to prevent those errors and provide help to get the user back on track. Defensive design for the Web usually focuses on the most common points of failure: forms, search, the address bar and server problems.

Defensive design:

• Employs validation to check for mistakes before they frustrate the user,
• Expands available options based on the user’s implied intent,
• Protects site visitors from server errors and broken links with informative messages and
• Assists the user before mistakes happen.

Defensive Design: Business Sense

If you want to grow your online business or just improve your blog, defensive design is one of the easiest upgrades — instead of trying to build audience, defensive design helps you better serve the audience you’ve got. The latter is far, far easier than the former.

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