Designing beyond the happy path

Mockups reflect an idealized version of the product: fast connections, perfect content, users following the perfect journey.  Reality is messier. Things break, content is missing, users make mistakes and have different real life expectations.

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Instead of treating these as edge cases, let’s make them part of the design process from the start. This talk explores practical strategies for designing products that handle the real world, not just the ideal one: from errors states to adapting to user’s situation, and avoiding harm, by thinking beyond our happy path assumptions.

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This session is for you, if:

• You’ve ever designed, or built something that looked great in a design tool, but, then discovered your deliverables were not enough to technically implement it, because a lot of cases and states were missing for your developers to work with.  

• You want actionable pointers (and a framework I’ll share at the end), to help you stop treating “edge cases” as afterthoughts, and want your design to be more robust, from the start, avoiding a lot of reworks in the process.

• You want to create more inclusive products, that are not only easy to build for your developer teams, because you prepared detailed mockups, but will also create a more resilient experience for your users. If you want to make sure, your product will adapt to real user needs, but also user preferences, and maybe even, anticipate (and avoid) potential harm.