Forgiveness

How to design products that help users when they make a mistake

We have all accidentally sent an email without an attachment or emptied our trash folder a little too fast. It’s not only embarrassing, it’s frustrating. Good systems allow users to correct their decisions.

We talk about “great ux” as seamless, intuitive, and delightful. In reality, great ux amounts to a product that isn’t frustrating. Want to frustrate your users in two clicks or less? Never give them a chance to correct their mistakes! Forgiveness is the best way to get your product from frustrating to good.

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Let’s go over a few examples of products and features that forgive users.

Gmail: Forgot to send an attachment

A wonderful feature born out of forgiveness. As a user of Gmail I have constantly sent emails without attachments and embarrassed myself when someone replies back with “did you mean to attach something”

This feature simply provides a little bit of feedback, and small speed bump to let users know that they typed “attachment” but didn’t attach anything. You might think this is a small edge case, but clearly the Gmail team had enough data to show that this feature would help. Features that focus on forgiveness can often be thought of as additions or edge cases but remember even the smartest of users make mistakes or encounter an edge case.

Dropbox: Deleted Files

A great example of of how forgiveness can turn into a powerful product & revenue generator. Dropbox let’s users recover flies and or revert them into past versions. This forgiving features has turned into a unique value proposition that Dropbox has even expanded into a paid feature. Forgiveness is a great way to show that your product is worth paying for and that users can expand the value they get from a brand with a paid plan.

Forgiveness is a great as a way to eliminate anxious moments, deleting is a lot less scary if you know it can be undone.

Conclusion
Forgiveness gives users a hug when they are worried, it gives them peace of mind when they forget, and gives them access to things they’ve deleted. Overall using forgiveness as a design principle creates a competitive advantage between your product and others. It creates a more useable and comprehensive system, that will delight users when they make a mistake.

I encourage you to think about how you can incorporate forgiveness into your core product. Forgiveness can be so much more than just an undo button, it can inspire whole features and product areas that can help users change their mind.

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