Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

There was a snowstorm overnight in the area, continuing through most of my long commute from Kansas City to Lawrence. Actually, my very long commute, because it was a reasonably serious storm and traffic was very slow indeed.

Yet the local NPR station insists repeatedly that there are no problems. They tell me there are not even delays, as I drive 25 mph on a 6 lane road, passing over the interstate where everyone is driving, oh… 1.

Eventually, the announcer tells us (paraphrasing, as I don’t have it recorded):

Metro Traffic is now telling us their website is not updating, and that is why I have been reporting no traffic problems this morning.

I’d like to thank the ten-thousand listeners who called in to tell me I don’t know what I am talking about.

Traffic reporting is a life/health/safety system, and close to a mission-critical one. People who fear driving probably set out with minimal preparation as a result of this reporting.

So why is the system so not-fault-tolerant? By which I mean, not the server, but the whole interactive system; why could the guy reading the site not tell it was out of date?

Luckily, he had a backup, users who can call in and pretty quickly get through to someone who can fix it. But what about your internet-based data updating system? Can it recognize old, or bad data?

There are many systems that are poor at this – I have worked to improve some, and use far too many day to day. Even more interfaces, only some of which I can improve, are poor at telling the user when the data is old, so they can make good decisions with it.

I consider this, in many ways, the downfall of use case generation. Formal development processes lead you to happy-path cases. Bring in worrywarts and naysayers (I think most UX folks are good at this) to bring up all the edge cases. Assume delays in viewing, and resumed sessions. Consider slow connections, misbehaving servers, and users sharing data in unexpected ways. How does your data look, and how trustworthy is it when everything is not going well?

All these are more likely yet for mobile systems, as we talk about a lot.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 9:47 am and is filed under Design, Mobile web, Widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.