Contingency design

Cory Doctrow presents notes from Jason “37 Signals” Fried’s talk at Reboot. Interesting stuff related to dealing with errors in web interfaces. Of course people will push the button twice sometimes, what do you do then? My wife once made an order for scientific supplices twice because of the way Netscape handles printing – it downloads the page fresh. Because the page had the side effect of inputting the order, printing the confirmation page made the order happen again. Systems should watch out for the identical order coming in twice within an interval and require extra confirmation. Error messages should make sense. The customer is your paycheck not a problem.

Via BoingBoing

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Dave Slusher is a blogger, podcaster, computer programmer, author, science fiction fan and father. Member of the Podcast Hall of Fame class of 2022.