In an ideal world developers would write software without bags and users will never press buttons by mistake.

Unfortunately we do not live in ideal world and therefore we have to consider a possibility for the end-users to foresee and easily recover from mistakes.

In order to provide useful support go through screens and think what what information users need and what they have to do in order to successfully complete a task.

Task analysis is especially important for rainy days scenarios for features that are used only once (like installation and setup).

Activities

• do classical task analysis enrolling down from high level steps to tinier ones,
• mark problematic points and points that require users to create or select some content,
• think where information that is needed to accomplish task can be found, is it obvious or users need to put some effort to get it,
• think of consequences if entered information is incorrect or operation fails,
• prepare tool-tips,
• consider validation,
• evaluate scenarios with technical experts either validation is possible,
• evaluate scenarios with end-users either tool-tips and validation make sense.