Contingency Design
Contingency Design is the idea that you need to accommodate potential failures within your design process. These failures may be caused by the people who use the thing that you have designed, or they may be failures of the thing itself.
When you apply the concept of contingency design to website design and development it therefore has many facets, and can contribute a lot to the success or failure of your online venture. This is particularly so because a lot of website design is done by designers who do not have the benefits of formal training, whether this is straightforward design qualifications, or refers to the concepts of Human Computer Interaction (HCI).
One way to think about contingency design is to consider the way that a salesperson works when he approaches you in an electrical goods store in the high street. And I mean a competent salesperson, not the sort who should go find another job. Say you ask for something that's not in stock - would you expect to be greeted with a flat refusal "no, we don't stock that"? Surely you would expect a competent salesperson to either offer you some viable alternatives, or explain how you can get the item you want, preferably using the services at that shop rather than from a competitor.
There are many ways of implementing contingency design into your website development process. One way is to think of the way that errors happen, and build in accommodating measures to improve the whole experience. Errors on web pages often come in the form of 404 Page Not Found error messages, so a lot of thought has been put into how these messages can be improved, and how extra functionality can be added to the 404 error message process in order to make the experience better for your website visitors.
Elegant 404 messages and content management systems
We've worked hard with 404 error messages on the Ecru content management system which is written in Microsoft .NET. The sorts of elegant measures we have put in place include specific 404 error messages when someone visits a page that has been retired by a content management system administrator. This makes life a little bit more palatable for a visitor when they have been referred to a website from a search engine, only to find the content that they were seeking has disappeared. Normally they would see an error message, but our CMS has been built to explain the absence of content in a more plausible way, and guide them to other content that might help them on the website.
In a way though, 404 messages are an easy issue to deal with and optimise, the harder issues are those that relate to customer (or visitor) interactions that fall slightly outside of the optimal paths that you have designed for, and that your application testing hasn't picked up because they are so peculiar or unpredictable. Things like error messages, instructive text in your interfaces, and sequential process flows. People have an unerring ability to launch themselves mid way into your processes by using the back button unexpectedly, or arriving from a search engine. Online banking systems are the extreme example of web systems that can't afford to make mistakes with these sequential issues, but really they affect everyone, even on seemingly insignificant systems.
Observe real life users
A lot of contingency design is about watching your real life users and understanding the problems they experience, whether it relates to understanding the language you use, the sequence, or the reason for technical processes to be constrained by operational or technical requirements. In insurance systems for example you need to get a number of deliberate agreements from your buyer relating to commitments, understanding and misrepresentation - you can't just remove these from your system interface because they lose or confuse your customers.
Another online system that often confounds website visitors is the search function that is often built in to the website. Search often delivers zero or unhelpful results, hiding the real information that the visitor wants. At Ecru we recently dealt with this problem by the use of keyword tagging on website content within our content management system. This system allows content administrators and editors to tag particular content and documents within their website so that these items can be flagged in a set of special search results. If administrators seek advice from their visitors regarding the usability of their website, and are intimately aware of the structure and content of their own website then this advanced search capability can work to overcome the most critical search system failures. This is an example of contingency design built in from the word go.
There are numerous things to be said about online forms when it comes to contingency planning, because these are often the stage at which maximum user interaction takes place. In some ways Ajax comes to the rescue here, as does client side validation, but there are some simple measures you can take to minimize the problems that result from failures, including minimizing the amount of information captured, failing bad information entry in an elegant, friendly and helpful way, and removing those "clear" buttons that wipe all of the carefully entered content from a web form. Another thing to remember is that people hate it when forms demand information they don't want to give, and they angst over using the back button just as much as you hate them using it.
Also, make sure your language is clear, concise and written in a way that accommodates the rules of the Plain English campaign. Don't use technical jargon, marketing terms or fluff. And if you use acronyms or abbreviations, always include the word or phrase in full at least somewhere on the page.
A lot of the changes that you accommodate when you consider contingency design are really easy to spot if you meticulously think about your website from the point of view of your visitors. Once you stop thinking about yourself and your own needs, and put yourself in their shoes, you have made a major leap forward, and you are much more likely to spot the small but crucial barriers to the success of your web application.
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What is contingency design?
Contingency Design is the process of preparing for failures within your web applications to mitigate the potential for disaster.
In the real world this means retaining and pleasing your website visitors rather than making them run for the hills when something goes wrong with your website.
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