Several times this week I've heard people comment that they've made an "operator error". This means there was a problem with what they were doing on the computer, and they feel they (the operator of the software) made the mistake.
One of these situations involved me as the operator. However, often these cases are actually problems with the user interface in some manner.
At the risk of turning this into a "moan and groan" session about my own troubles, let me relate the story of this to you:
I have a domain name registered through www.godaddy.com. I was getting nice notices from them to my main email account telling me that the domain would be auto-renewed. Notice how nice and pretty these notifications are. And how relatively clear it is:
I was also getting notifications to another email account like this:
Plain text, with the not very clear title "Item Expiration Notice"... just what item is expiring? If you look at the text near the bottom, though, you'll see this is pretty important. My credit card was "bouncing". Of course, I didn't notice this (indeed, I barely noticed the text email messages after seeing the nice graphical ones, much less the significance of what I was seeing).
So, my domain expired, and it cost me much money to pull it out of limbo.
As I investigated what lead to this little problem, I discovered that godaddy has two email addresses for me in my account. One associated with the account as a whole, and one associated with my credit card. So, reasonably, they were sending notices about my credit card to one email account and notices about my domain being auto-renewed to another.
The puzzling thing to me is: why did they need two email accounts? Why not one? Is this a reflection of their internal structure (the finance department insisted "We can't use the other email account you have gotten from them. We need our own!"), or was the person designing this part of their web experience somehow thinking most people would want to have this info go to different places (I'm not at all clear why I put two different email addresses in these two. I suspect that if these notices had been going to the same account I would have been more likely to catch on to the fact that soemthing was going wrong).
Either way, I thought this was an interesting example of a common problem with user experience design. The interfaces, meaning the parts that one sees and interacts with, of each part of this system were good (well, perhaps the textual email message could be clearer!). But the overall user experience was disastrous for me. And it is so often true that the failures in user experience happen despite there being good interfaces at each step of the way.