Designing for “How might things go wrong?”

As designers, we often focus on creating experiences that “seamlessly” guide users toward success. But, what about those inevitable times when things don’t go as planned? I hate to say this, but many designers and business stakeholders still overlook the Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) even with a booming tech market today.

DFMEA is all about preparing for when things go wrong and guiding users toward a safe and manageable outcome to mitigate damage.

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” — Henry Ford

We are often taught to craft interfaces, obsess over user flows, and agonize over every pixel. But here’s a hard truth: even the best designers fail.

Helping users recover from errors is a lot more than just having clean-looking error 404 pages, error messages, and input forms. But who ACTUALLY designs the recovery process for us when we stumble?

Nobody teaches us how to manage our own professional mistakes.