Life as seen through product design coloured lenses (rose coloured lenses, but make it UX)
I’ve been a worrier all my life. This means that I’m the mom friend who’s always got hand sanitiser, Clarityn, pads, etc. Being prepared for every situation has its uses but being overly-anxious can be annoying at best and overwhelming at worst.
I’ve learned to handle my anxious thoughts with an arsenal of coping mechanisms. Some are healthy (walks in parks! cat-petting!) and some are less healthy (mindless scrolling! staring into the void!). And ever since I became a product designer, I’ve added a new weapon to my toolkit.
Edge cases vs common use cases
I first heard the term “use case” during a job interview. I had no idea what it meant but nodded my way through the call and later googled it. Here’s a good definition: “A use case is a written description of how users will perform tasks on your website…Use cases add value because they help explain how the system should behave and in the process, they also help brainstorm what could go wrong.”
To me, use cases = common scenarios that a user will encounter. Let’s say you’re helping Dominos 🍕 redesign their website. One use case you’ll need to plan for is the checkout & pay via credit card flow. No payment = no pizza and paying via credit card is standard across e-commerce, so this is an important use case to consider.
By contrast an edge case is defined as “a problem or situation, especially in computer programming, that only happens at the highest or lowest end of a range of possible values or in extreme situations.” A simpler definition: rare and highly improbable (but not impossible) scenarios that a user might encounter.
Going back to Dominos, let’s say that hungry customers also have the option to pay cash upon delivery. You’ve got a hunch that this is a less popular checkout option and ask the engineers to run some numbers. It turns out that only 5% of orders are paid via cash upon delivery. Knowing this makes prioritisation easy — the majority of your effort should be spent on the checkout via credit card flow because it’s the most common use case that affects a majority of your customers.
So how does this help my anxiety? Well, when I put on my product design hat, I start to handle my energy and resources more shrewdly. Just as I’d allocate a tiny amount of effort (if any at all) to a once-in-a-blue-moon edge case, I won’t waste time agonising over something that’s highly unlikely. Easier said than done, but this shift in thinking has prevented me from going down many a rabbit hole.
Nervous Nellies, I hope this helps. If in doubt, just do what I do whenever I start to “What if…?”: yell “I’ve got no time for edge cases!” and self-soothe with pizza.
