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Learning from mistakes

We should not repeat mistakes and if its the end user that is committing same mistake again and again then the UX should be changed to make it difficult for user to perform such actions. Make the user apply some cognitive thinking before he can do a detrimental action and make the action obscure.

For e.g. we are a filesystem company and "Trash delete" is a detrimental action, over past few years I had several tickets where user accidentally clicked Empty trash and deleted all his files or he clicked Delete Permanently instead of Restore. He was able to do all this  because in the UX the actions are close to each other





There are users who did this and immediately created tickets under panic and some even blaming that system did delete instead of restore.  I know in UI it may look bad but I have seen several companies solving this by making user think twice before invoking detrimental action like asking a captcha or make the delete and restore flow different like send him an email with confirmation like before he can do Empty trash.

An easier thing would be to just move the actions far apart and put some filler actions between them and change color of action buttons, like make it dumb for user to know which he is clicking.

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