Lockouts are a strategy to keep someone in a space or prevents an action until the desired operations are done. Lockouts are usually used for safety reasons. Forcing functions can be a nuisance that people will deliberately disable, making the safety feature void. Good deign will minimize the nuisance while retaining the safety feature.
Example from Original Source:
Source: The Design of Every Day Things
Example from Different Source:
Source: iPhone Lockout Screen to protect content of phone
Real World Example:
Source: Waze Passenger Mode for usage while vehicle is moving
Amir, I like how you highlighted, that in addition to preventing undesired behavior, a good design using lockouts should balance minimizing the nuisance factor while still restricting behavior. A good lockout shouldn’t hinder normal behavior too much but still prevent undesired actions. The Waze app passenger mode is a good example demonstrating this balance.
My example: Bic Multi-Purpose lighter. To turn on the fire the user has to press and hold 2 buttons: the button at the top with the thumb and the trigger with the index finger. This design prevents the user from accidentally pulling the trigger and lighting something unintended on fire which could cause injury or damage. It requires extra work to use, but using one more finger is not much more work.
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71KWJeaSxAL._SL1107_.jpg
Thanks for your comment, Gary! I really like your example of the Bic Multi-Purpose lighter. The safety feature and prevention of intended actions outweighs the extra step you need to do. This strategy is applicable across mobile applications all the way to enterprise level applications and is critical when the interface a user is interacting with gets more complicated, and has more sensitive information and actions.
Hey big brother great principle to choose, “lockouts”. I especially like the example you gave of the iPhone lockout screen. I also believe that this principle may have negative ramifications if implemented incorrectly. I’ll give you an example lets say your sitting in class messing around with someones phone, your trying to guess their password and after several times it completely wipes out the phone, erases everything. That would suck to be that guy. Maybe apple should give a warning before it completely obliterates your phone? Heres some more information on that.
https://ioshacker.com/how-to/enable-erase-data-option-delete-data-10-failed-passcode-attempts
Appreciate your comment little bro! You’re absolutely correct! Your example sounds like a pretty bad situation to be in. Can’t imagine how bad that person would feel for erasing everything! This is where the strategy around confirmation aligns with this strategy around lockouts.