Is there a term for "the user can’t use anything wrong" design?
I'm of the opinion that the user is always using software or hardware correctly and to imply otherwise is rude, condescending, and philosophically wrong. For example, I and everyone I know pulls USB drives out of a computer without bothering to click eject. OS developers should see this and build their software to accommodate this instead of bothering users with "you did that wrong" messages.
Is this a widely-held view among UX designers/developers? Is there an official term for this philosophy?
edit: It seems I need to clarify what I mean by "the user can't use anything wrong". I'm not saying that the user should be prevented from using something wrong, but that there aren't any "wrong" ways to use something. If a large percentage of users use a microphone as a hammer (like the Shure SM57 genuinely is), designers should embrace this and improve the hammer capabilities in the next iteration.
edit 2: I'd like to thank you all for proving my point. I posted here a point (the user can't use anything wrong) that I interpreted one way and you all interpreted another way. My intention was that there are no wrong actions to take, and your overall interpretation was that there are indeed wrong actions, and we should work to prevent these.
All of you are correct. As the designer of the post, I'm at fault here, and I think you'd agree. I should have made it more clear what I intended the point of this post to be. I have no right to try to argue with any of you about what my intentions are because only the user's interpretation matters. Thank you for such a invigorating discussion!