Scott Steinberg · Consultant, Analyst and Business Strategist
When a person makes a costly mistake using a product or system, the reflex is to call it user error. Frequently the design created the conditions for it: a warning nobody could see, an alert indistinguishable from a hundred others, an action made as easy as its safe alternative. A reviewer, tester and consultant to 3000+ brands on areas like consumer product, UX, UI, CX and digital experience, Scott Steinberg examines these conditions and more.
Expert reports, declarations, deposition and trial testimony on UI, UX, CX, digital interface error conditions, warnings and instruction comprehension, alerting and attention, operator workload, user behavior evidence and more.
Sample areas of coverage include AI, UI, CX, UX, digital interfaces, consumer products and enterprise software. Our work is also often paired with that of other SMEs in legal matters.
Errors cluster where designs invite them: adjacent controls with opposite effects, confirmation dialogs that appear so often people dismiss them reflexively, defaults that favor the risky path.
Testimony identifies the specific conditions present and explains, from established literature, why a competent person operating normally would predictably make that mistake.
A warning has to be encountered, read, understood and acted on, and each stage has documented failure conditions relating to placement, wording, timing and competition for attention.
Testimony addresses whether the communication was reasonably capable of working at each of those stages for the person it was aimed at.
Systems that alert constantly train the people using them to ignore alerts, and the effect is well documented across every field where it has been studied.
Testimony addresses alert volume, whether severity was distinguishable, and whether a specific warning was realistically capable of interrupting someone under load.
Performance degrades predictably under concurrent demands, time pressure and interruption, and systems designed for undivided attention fail in environments that never provide it.
Testimony addresses the actual conditions of use and whether the design accounted for them.
When a decision rests on displayed information, presentation determines whether the person can read the situation accurately: what is emphasized, what is aggregated away and whether staleness is visible.
Testimony addresses whether the display supported or undermined an accurate reading at the moment of decision.
Where a defense rests on inadequate training, the questions are what training was provided, what the design assumed the user would know, and how discoverable critical functions were without it.
Testimony addresses the division between what design should make evident and what training reasonably has to supply.
Logs, telemetry, session records and support contacts show what users actually did, frequently revealing that many people made the same mistake before the one that reached litigation.
Testimony assembles that record, which converts an argument about one person's competence into evidence about a pattern.
The central question in most of these matters is how much of an outcome the design accounts for and how much the person does.
Testimony addresses that division directly, identifying which conditions the design created and which lay with the operator, without collapsing into either extreme.
Reconstructing what a person actually saw requires the interface and materials as they existed at the time, which are rarely archived. Establishing that is usually the first task. Any party may instruct.
Written opinions on error conditions, warning comprehension, attention demands and design contribution to outcomes, etc..
Testimony on why a person behaved as they did, grounded in established literature rather than hindsight.
Responsive analysis of user error attributions, comprehension claims and workload assumptions.
Non-testifying interface and materials reconstruction, plus discovery scoping for interaction records.
Scott Steinberg is a product tester, reviewer, strategic consultant and business trends expert with over 28 years of experience providing management and strategic consulting services to more than 3,000 businesses and brands ranging from startups to government agencies and Fortune 500 firms.
He has testified in sample areas including intellectual property — copyrights, trademarks and patents — patent infringement, marketing, branding, video games, mobile applications, consumer product development, and the growth and monetization of online distribution platforms.
He is the author of over 30 books and has published more than five thousand articles addressing areas including but not limited to marketing, technology, leadership, innovation, advertising, digital transformation, data privacy and social networks. He appears regularly on ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC, and has led seminars and training programs for organizations including Wells Fargo, the PGA Tour, Century 21, Ford, Dell and Procter & Gamble.
His consulting work has been broadly recognized. He has served as a thought leader for the American Bar Association and Corporate Counsel magazine, and has received honors from the International Association for Scholastic Excellence, Fortune, and the 21st Century Icon Awards, among others.
Human factors in digital interfaces, consumer products and enterprise software: why errors occurred, whether warnings were capable of working, how alerting and workload affected performance, and how much of an outcome the design accounts for. It works from established literature rather than from hindsight about what a person should have done.
No. Describing the conditions a design created is different from saying the operator bears no responsibility, and testimony that collapses into either extreme is worth little. The useful contribution is identifying which conditions the design produced and which lay with the person, and being explicit about the division.
Items like interaction logs, telemetry, session records and support contacts showing what users actually did across a population. When many people made the same mistake, the question stops being about one person's competence and becomes a documented pattern the design produced.
They overlap and are frequently run together. The UI practice addresses interface design against usability and accessibility standards. This one addresses human performance and error specifically, which is the framing when an incident or harm rather than a design dispute is at issue.
Initial conversations about scope, timing and conflicts are without charge. Helpful detail includes the product or system, the incident or decision at issue and the period involved, plus any expert disclosure deadline already set.
A conflicts check is run before any substantive discussion. An initial note listing the party names and a one-line description of the dispute is enough to start; please hold privileged or confidential material until the check clears.