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Edge Cases Are Real and They’re Hurting Your Users
Designing for the “happy path” best-case scenario leaves our most vulnerable users on the margins
In our drive for speed, we have conditioned ourselves to ignore our most vulnerable users. We design for the happy path, and society pays the price.
The happy path
To create digital products, designers often start by developing a set of scenarios or use cases. These scenarios help determine the features, interactions, and technological infrastructure required in a product.
As an example, let’s think about Facebook. When Mark Zuckerberg was initially creating the social network he may have had a scenario like this in his head:
“An undergrad who wants to share pictures from a party with her friends.”
This is a straightforward statement, but even something as simple as this can help a designer conceptualize the kind of solution required. In the case of a digital product, they can start to imagine the screens that might be needed, the elements on those screens, and so on.
Scenarios come in two basic flavors: happy path and edge cases.
The happy path is a scenario where everything is perfectly aligned for the…
