So many times people ask me why something breaks on a website. They immediately want to attack the programming / programmer and sometimes forget that it takes a small village to run a website. There are also external factors such as external services, buggy client software, non-updated browsers, viruses and malware, etc. that can cause issues with websites.

The most interesting thing this chart points out is that while there is only once clear channel to move through for a success, there are several points of failure that can cause users to experience problems. One of the most common of those, which is never thought of, is that users sometimes don’t understand the scope of the task they are trying to accomplish. This causes one of two things to happen:

1) A user asks for a feature that isn’t needed.
2) A user believes a problem occurs when it doesn’t.
3) A user causes a problem because of something not being right with settings or something on the device.

With the above chart this could simplify explaining this to a customer, a boss, or anyone else that asks the questions such as “Why do things break when nothing has been changed?”.