Designing for Edge Cases: Beyond the Ideal User.

Let’s say your website is designed for John, a 35 year old tech savvy business man who lives in blah blah blah. John is your ideal user, but it’s important to note that John isn’t a real person; he’s a fictional character that represents hundreds, thousands, or sometimes millions of individual humans who will be interacting with your product.

Because of this, you cannot expect every version of John to behave and act the same way while using your product. Sometimes John is sleep-deprived on a busy commuter bus with a poor internet connection. Sometimes John’s phone will die mid-sign-up or during checkout. And sometimes John will be carrying something heavy in one hand, so he has only one hand free.

Not every user is going to follow the happy, trouble-free user journey you crafted during your product research, so it’s crucial to consider more than just your “Ideal User”.

So What Exactly Is an Edge Case?

In simple terms, an edge case is a scenario where a person uses a product in a way that lies outside the typical user journey for the product. A scenario that the designers did not consider during development.

For example lets say you’ve created a mobile app with an interactive step-by-step set-up process. The user progresses through the steps, and they get to the last stage that says, “hold both thumbs on the screen to begin”. For your typical users, this is simple, but what if your user, Jane, is an amputee with only one hand? The simple step becomes a barrier for Jane

While Jane might represent a small percentage of your user base, from her POV, the product is broken. This is a prime example of how edge cases can affect your users. It’s not just a statistical failure; it’s a real person who is hindered by a barrier you unintentionally built. When we design our products for the “Ideal User”, we can inadvertently tell other users that the product isn’t for them.

Edge Case Examples

Jane’s experience is a reminder that standard interactions aren’t nearly as universal as we think, and Jane is far from the only person who gets left behind when we focus solely on the “Ideal User”. Edge cases can come in all different kinds of shapes and sizes; some can cause small hurdles for users while others can ruin their experience entirely, like Jane.

Here are some other examples of edge cases so you get what I’m trying to say:

• You’ve created a profile card that displays your user’s name and details. But what happens when a user has a 20-character-long surname? If the design wasn’t prepared for this, it could break the design.
• A user is browsing your product with a poor internet connection. They hit “save” on an item while their internet is buffering, so the command doesn’t go through. What happens now? Will the user get an error message? How will this be communicated to the user?
• A user is using an old, smaller smartphone. A terms and conditions pop-up appears on their screen, but because the screen size is so small, the accept button lies outside the screen, leaving the user trapped.

Some edge cases annoy your users, some really annoy them, and some really piss them off enough to abandon your product altogether. They won’t kick up a fuss, and you’ll never know about them. They’ll simply leave and never return.

The Value of Addressing Edge Cases

It’s easy to look at some of these examples and think to yourself, is it really worth putting in the extra time to account for these edge cases in your designs? Well, if you want a product that is trustworthy and won’t fall apart when things get messy, then the answer is yes.

Edge cases that are handled correctly can build a huge amount of trust with your users. Even something like saving your users’ information if their phone dies mid-use can have a huge impact on your users.

As mentioned earlier, edge cases have the potential to block or make your users abandon your product, so any chance to create and build that trust with your user should be taken. When a user leaves your product for good, you haven’t just lost a sale, you’ve lost a potential long-term customer, and it costs significantly more to gain new users than to keep old ones.

Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail

So how do we identify these edge cases? Well, you have to take your design and really put it under the microscope, bringing a more pessimistic view to it.

You need to stress test your design, pushing it to its limits to see where it breaks. For example, for any name fields, forget about your “John Smith” and replace it with as long a name as you can think of. This will show where your design starts to overlap and crumble.

Is your website going to have multiple language options? Well, you should probably test that out too. The word “add” is quite common amongst e-commerce websites for adding items to your bag. Well, the German word for “add” is “Hinzufügen”. That’s a jump from a 3-character word to an 11-character word, something you’d rarely think of that could easily break your design.

It’s easy to get tunnel vision as a designer, so it’s definitely important to collaborate with others on this too. You should sit down with your team and intentionally try to break your user flow. Don’t mimic your Ideal user’s behaviours; you should go through your process while actively doing the opposite.

I could keep going on and on, but the moral of the story is to prepare your design for the unexpected through testing and more testing. If you avoid this, you risk shipping a design that excludes a portion of your audience.

As Roy Keane once said: “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail”. Well, it was Benjamin Franklin first, I think.

Embrace the Real World

If you’re only designing for your “ideal user”, then you’re basically crossing your fingers and hoping for the best. If you take the time to look beyond the ideal user, you’ll end up with a design that accommodates (nearly) everyone.

At the end of the day, we’re not designing our products for robots or for the fictional user personas we generated. We’re designing for the unpredictable and sometimes chaotic nature of humans. You’ll never account for everyone, and you probably won’t identify every edge case before launch, but the best we can do as designers is try our best to create inclusive designs.

The edge cases of today can become the norms of tomorrow, so staying curious about how habits are changing is key if you don’t want to fall behind.

If you’re looking for a UX Agency that builds products that actually work in the real world, get in touch with us today.