Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot !

We’ve all been there, haven’t we? I’m talking of course, about idiot-proofing. This goes for having the word Diesel in big bold size 100 font stamped across your petrol cap to ensure you don’t pour anything but diesel into your diesel car. Or where you spend hours ensuring that your application can reverse an action, even ensuring that your app can handle that one buffoon out there who will click yes when asked “Are you really, really, really sure you want to delete absolutely everything – this is no going back after this !” You have sleepless nights pondering just how to ensure that 'one idiot user' can’t manage to bring an entire trading system down by find a complete random set of keystrokes that a) you can’t predict or b) he can’t recall or reproduce.

I’ve heard many times before – “Never underestimate the idiot because there is always an idiot out there who will prove you wrong!”

This is one of the golden rules for any software developer. And then, just today at work, our regular office idiot user managed to reach new depths of ineptitude that even a fully equipped, state of the art submarine, would have imploded before reaching these depths. I truly have conceded defeat in my attempt to ever make any of my applications “Mr C Retin – proof”.

Many of our internal systems generate automated reports at the end of cycles and processes. These reports are then emailed to a predefined set of users for their reference, requirement, or just because we want to clog up their email boxes. The reports generated are Excel spreadsheets (so they can perform pivot tables, colour coding, charts, searches etc…) and are attached to emails which contain precise details about what the attached report contains, what is for, when it was run and by which process. If a user has a query they can simply forward one of these emails to us with their question. Ergo, we then have all the info we need to be able to answer his query because we know which report the question refers to and where it came from. Sounds simple enough, what could possibly go wrong this, seriously, what??

Then today Mr C Retin had a query about a report. Even now, many hours on, I struggle to deduce exactly what was going through his moronic head when he opted to print out a random page from a report, walk from his pc to the printer, pick up this page, then walk over to the scanner, scan it and email it back to himself walk back to his pc and then email us a question while attaching said scanned in page. We have no idea what report his question refers to, nor what day is for nor anything that could remotely give us a clue about what he wants to know.

Mr C Retin has reached a stage of incompetency that even Baldrick would be proud of and struggle to replicate. Aside from using words of only one syllable to explain what information we need to help him, and how he could just simply forward on one of these report emails, how else can we make it easier for our special user to ask us questions about reports in future? How can we predict the ways he will ask us questions? 

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