There’s a well-known quote, “When something is made idiot proof, they will just make better idiots.” In other words, people are great at finding ways to misuse the products we create, and preventing that misuse is an endless task.

In fact, in my experience, we spend more time “idiot proofing” our devices than implementing their positive functionality i.e., the essential duties that we expect them to perform.

As a longtime medical device developer, I would say that the biggest problem is not so much that people are idiots; it’s more that they want to get their work done and if the equipment gets in the way of getting work done they will figure out clever and unanticipated workarounds to speed things up. And those unanticipated workarounds cause unanticipated problems.

The most important thing is to work closely with users during the development process to make sure it’s really easy and obvious for them to get their work done so they don’t go looking for workarounds. One of the deadly sins described in my book Prototype to Product is that we technologists usually think we know what users need, but we usually don’t. (Users often don’t know what they want either – that’s covered too.)

Having a collaborative and iterative design process is an important key to delivering what users want, which in turn is the surest and least expensive way to “idiot proof” our devices.