Blog 8

After trying to complete a bunch of different tasks on the site, I feel like wufoo does a good job of utilizing error handling techniques discussed in Chapter 6. The forms' text boxes and fields are all 'obvious' and the required fields all seem to have a default value in them which follows the poka-yoke prevention device. The site seems very user-oriented in its design which I feel like goes hand-in-hand with design that avoids putting unclear error messages in users' faces because of problems that should ultimately be on the designers to prevent or fix. In once instance though, if you go to delete a form, a 'rude' error message appears. Although it fairly clearly explains why it's occurring, wufoo doesn't provide an 'undo' feature of any kind if the user accidentally instinctively just clicks "OK" when the error message pops up. At this point the deletion is permanent which could cause a big problem when a more forgiving software approach could provide an easy fix in the way of making it possible to undo the action and eliminate the problem. Overall though, wufoo seems to do a good job of error handling in its design and in providing the user with an environment that prevents them from/helps them avoid making errors themselves.