Contingency design refers to the design and implementation of features that serve to help a user along when things go wrong with the application or website they are using. A very basic example would be a well thought out error page. Some more ideas and examples are discussed in the articles below.
Note: Some bits edited and added a few hours after posting, mostly things I mention in the comments below. The time/volume limited sale I buy a lot of stuff online, from plane tickets to books to electronics and gifts for friends... Read more »
The situation You blog. People find your blog interesting, you get traffic. You get comment spam, you get e-mail spam. You run spam filters to keep your inbox clean. You've become popular amongst your peers. They send you e-mail.... Read more »
While monkeying around with an error document for a clients site, I accidentally discovered a neat solution to a problem we were having. While rather specific to the situation, I thought I'd post it up here as maybe someone could extend... Read more »
The progression The beginning When I first started designing sites, they were static, table based brochure sites consisting of 'not-very-many' pages. These sites tended to cache quite well on the client side once downloaded, and... Read more »
Keith over at Asterisk, and Jason at 37signals, both recently posted about their efforts at trying to get stuff done on the web. While Jason outlines an example of good contingency design, Keith provides what amounts to a list of things... Read more »