Human Error or Design Error?

The alleviation of human error, whether design or intrinsically human, continues to be the most important problem aerospace is facing — Jerome . F. Lederer

Does human error cause accidents? Yes, but we need to know what led to the error — Don Norman

In many fields 60–80% of all accidents are due to human error. These assumptions are misleading because they think that a person should have taken or not taken a possible action, but the real source of the error is the design rather than the human. When the inevitable error occurs, it is blamed on the human rather than on the flawed design. In short, designers sometimes expect the user to compensate for their poor design.

Falsely blaming yourself

People make errors, sometimes serious ones with devices, light switches, fuses, computers, mobiles etc. And when people do things wrong they blame themselves for their “stupidity” and feel guilty or try to hide their error. “The false idea that a person is at a fault is incorporated in the society”.

Human error is usually result of poor design. Designers blame the users when something goes wrong but in a way they are blaming their designs. Blaming the person won’t fix the problem as the same mistake is likely to be repeated by someone else.

Of course, people make errors. Complex devices will always require some instructions and someone using complex device/application without knowing it should expect to make errors and get confused. “But designers should take special pains to make designs as error-free as possible”.

What to do?

1. When people interact with machine, things will not always go smoothly. This is to be expected, so the designers should design keeping this in mind.
2. Our strengths are our “Creativity” and “Flexibility”so it is easy for us to come up with the novel problem solution. Machines are not people then why do we put requirements of machine above people? Try to solve requirements of people then you won’t have any problem with machines.
3. Designers should always try to minimize the chance of inappropriate actions in the first place by using affordances, signifiers, and constant guide to the actions. Still, if a person performs an inappropriate action then the designer should maximize the chance of design which can be discovered and then can be solved.
4. Eliminate the term human error. When people collaborate with one another, the word error is never used between them. That is because each person is trying to understand and respond to the other and when something is not understood they solve that by questioning and collaborating with one another. Then why can’t the interaction between people and machine can be thought of collaboration?

Conclusion

This does not mean that people never make mistakes but the percentage of design error is much more that human error which designers should take special pain to make design error free.

Thank you :)