In billiards, there are a few different ways to win a game. The most reliable way is to spend a whole lot of time perfecting your stroke, tweaking your stance, becoming a master strategist, and practicing the tough shots as diligently as the easy ones. This is what the pros do. They spend years running drills, playing people better than they are, and pushing themselves to be great.

A less reliable, but still effective, way is to learn the basics of stroke, stance, and strategy, and become a decent player who can hold your own. No professional pool-playing aspirations here. Just a solid ability to beat most people who challenge you on a bar table.

The least reliable method is the one most people learn and subsequently stick to. It’s the “poke-and-hope” method. This means you poke your pool cue at that little white ball and hope something goes into a pocket.

Beginners almost always rely on poke-and-hope. More advanced players occasionally find themselves in situations where they need to rely on it as well. Pros do it the least, but it still happens.

In the same way that most pool players fall into the beginner category, most computer users never learn the basic concepts and techniques for using one. They do this, of course, because they have better things to do than master the personal computer, just like they have better things to do than become master pool players.

Regardless, this leads to all sorts of problems. People right-click in web applications and look for task-level options in the browser’s default context menu. They enter their email addresses into the browser’s Address bar and wonder why their email doesn’t come up. They hold a piece of paper up to a monitor screen and wonder why it can’t be scanned. More often than not, they click a Submit button at the bottom of a form and pray they filled it out correctly so they don’t see a bunch of annoying error messages that will make them feel stupid.

In other words, they poke and hope.

If you’re a poke-and-hope kind of pool player, you may finally be able to empathize with how most people feel when working with software on the web. There’s no skill, no foundation, no deep knowledge. There’s only the hope that whatever you poke will get you one step closer to stealing a game or two.

The cure for a lot of this is poka-yoke, Japanese for “error-proofing”. (Sadly, poke-and-hope and poka-yoke don’t really rhyme. But they look like they do when spelled out in a blog post, so I still get points for being clever.)

Eliminating the possibility of error in your application means your poke-and-hope users can now use your application without feeling like morons, even if they know next to nothing about how the web really works. Even if they think Internet Explorer’s Help menu contains information about your web application. Even if they enter URLs into the search box on your site in hopes that the new site will magically appear.

I’ve said this in presentations on many occasions: The single best thing you can do to significantly improve your web applications - now and forever - is remove the possibility of error. Users who can’t make mistakes feel smart. They feel respected. They feel productive.

Smart, respected, productive useres are the best users in the whole world, because they tell other people how great it is to use your application. And that’s just good marketing.

If you want some people like this talking about your application, start turning your poke-and-hope into poka-yoke.

Posted by Robert on April 21st, 2007

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