User Error is a Myth

In a meeting earlier today, a colleague used the term user error. My ears perked up. After nearly twenty years building digital products, I’ve heard this phrase countless times and it never sits right.

This is how I’ve found it usually plays out: Someone uses our product in an unexpected way. Something breaks or doesn’t work like they thought it would. A product team member then asserts:

• “They’re using it wrong.”
• “The app isn’t designed to work that way.”
• “They just need to tap this button first.”
• “The software is functioning as designed.”

Next comes the verdict: user error. The person is making the mistake, not us. They need to adapt to our design, not the other way around.

This mindset is poison for great product work.

Every unexpected behavior, every “misuse,” every bug report from someone navigating our product differently than we imagined aren’t errors. They’re signals. They’re opportunities to learn about actual usage patterns, understand what people are really trying to accomplish, and iterate toward something better.

The phrase user error lets us off the hook too easily. It places blame on the person trying to get something done rather than on the system we designed. It assumes our mental model of how the product should work is the only valid one.

Users don’t care about our mental models. They care about their goals. If our product makes it easy to take a wrong turn, that’s a product problem, not a user problem.

There’s no such thing as user error. There’s only unwillingness to acknowledge that we might have gotten things wrong and a refusal to recognize opportunity to make things better.