Smart behavior over smart errors

As someone who designs interfaces, I have to make a lot of decisions about how things should operate in a number of different situations (including the edge cases). Sometimes it’s good to have the user correct whatever the issue is, and sometimes it’s good to just go ahead and do it for them.

The other day I saw the peculiar quickbooks error over at svn. Go look at that error if you haven’t already.

Ridiculous, huh?

That’s a situation where you definitely want to go ahead and strip the $ off of the price before saving/computing/whatever. There’s absolutely no reason for the user to be involved.

Don’t make your application feel like it’s a jail cell with a strict set of rules. Sometimes it’s good to give a little leeway. It helps your users feel more comfortable using your application. And that’s a good thing :-)

So, the next time you’re confronted with this situation, just be smart about it. Ask yourself if it’s really necessary to involve the user. While it’s crucially important to have smart error handling, sometimes it’s even more important to have smart behavior. It makes for a better interface, a better design, and an overall better experience.