Is There a Substitute for Participatory Design?

There's no substitute for participatory design, which is to say nothing about us without us. I think that the lower hanging fruit is always stuff you can just do in your head. It could always cool new features, but for every new feature that could go right, at least five things could go wrong. So it's our responsibility to spend at least as much time designing for those outcomes. But again, some of us who write error messages are trained to think about those outcomes.