Github, Rails and Interface Design

All the excitement over the Rails and Github hack reminded me about Scott Meyers (author of Effective C++ et al.) who has talked about the subject of interface design many times (including in the aforementioned book) and his perspective puts the ball squarely in the Rails team’s court.

Let’s make the reasonable assumption that your clients—the people using your interfaces— are trying to do a good job. They’re smart, they’re motivated, they’re conscientious. They’re willing to read some documentation to help them understand the system they’re using. They want things to behave correctly.

That being the case, if they make a mistake when using your interface, it’s your fault. We’re assuming they’re doing their best—they want to succeed. If they fail, it’s because you let them. So, if somebody uses your interface incorrectly, either they’re working hard at it (less likely) or your interface allowed them to do something easy that was not correct (more likely). This puts the shoe on the foot not used to wearing it: it means that responsibility for interface usage errors belongs to the interface designer, not the interface user.

Source: Scott Meyers: The Most Important Design Guideline?