Got a little blogging contest for you. Here are the rules.

1. Write a blog post that links to the Amazon pages for Designing the Moment or Designing the Obvious.
2. Send me the link to your blog post.

If you win, I’ll do a free, 1-hour Q&A session, by phone, for you and 5 of your closest friends, where you can ask me anything you want.

The contest starts right now (posts written before today don’t count — UPDATE: find out why here) and ends on Tuesday, July 15th at 11:59pm. I’ll notify the winner by email, and we’ll arrange a date and time for the call then.

To choose the winner, I’ll write up the names of everyone who sends me a link to a qualifying blog post on a piece of paper, cut it up, and throw the pieces into a hat, then have an innocent bystander choose a name from the hat.

(Hint! Get your 5 friends to do a blog post as well to increase your group’s odds of being picked.)

Good luck!

Poka-yoke is Japanese for “error-proofing”. A poka-yoke device is any type of device or process used to prevent errors or to immediately handle them.

There are two types of poka-yoke devices: detection devices and prevention devices. A detection device is used to detect when errors occur and immediately provide notification of the error. A prevention device is used to prevent an error from occuring in the first place. Prevention is preferable, but not alawys possible.

Implement poka-yoke devices to ensure high quality by finding ways to ensure mistakes are minimized, in software products and in business processes.

For example:

• Developers can use unit testing as a regular coding practice (“test-first” programming).
• Application designers can use peer reviews to ensure nothing was missed in the designs and to spot potential issues.
• Every iteration can undergo usability reviews from staff experts using the designs as a guide, and QA can leverage the designs to write test cases.
• Inline editing solutions can be used in forms so that users can’t submit data until a form is correctly completed.

An ounce of prevention is a pound of cure. The more you do up front to prevent mistakes – quickly, of course - the less money you’ll spend fixing things later, and the happier customers will be.

(This tip is from the Kaizen Software Manifesto. Learn more about it here.)