Just Undo It: Designing To Recover From Mistakes
John Maeda’s book The Laws of Simplicity
Maeda explains his law number 8, Trust, with a real world example. On it, he says that making an item return at stores an easy process improves customer trust (easy undoing of a purchase). If the purchase is correctable customers will have the feeling that shopping is simple.
Why should we make web design more trusty?
Maeda’s law number 8 could be easily applied to web design. Allowing users to undo actions on a web page could:
1. Make a website more trusty.
2. Save users’ time as it encourages fast actions ("it can be undone anyways").
3. Give the feeling that using a website is easier than others.
4. Improve a brand image (because of the previous 3 points).
Implementing undo features on the web requires more design work and extra programming, but rewards could be great. I’ve found some examples on the web where undo features are applied (or could be):
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The Google Case Google is great implementing undo-options. The best example is the Gmail design, with which the user can delete emails knowing that if he makes a mistake undoing will be extremely easy.
Unfortunately Google is not using undo options in all its tools. Google Calendar works like an old school application asking users if they do really want to delete an event. This makes Google Calendar less efficient and makes users waste their time (I must confess that I love Google Calendar anyways).
Undo Feature Could Improve Sales At Wal-Mart users do not fear clicking on the "Add To Cart" button because they know that deleting items from the shopping cart is easy. Making users’ life easy does not only improve the overall website usability but it also builds trust that could be translated into more sales.
The Wal-Mart shopping cart: deleting items is easy.
Writing Without Thinking 37signals knows very well the power of undoing. After leaving a comment on Basecamp an "Edit (for another 15 minutes)" link is displayed. This gives users the advantage of writing comments fast and the power of undoing/editing after posting.
Your Sheet Is Gone, Forever I couldn’t find an Undo button on the Zoho Sheet application. Indeed, when I was trying to delete a sheet I got a message alerting me that there is no going back for that action. This is bad.
The glorious undo: On the other hand, Google Spreadsheets has an undo button.
Although having an undo button is nice, I would prefer not to be asked each time I want to delete something. Imagine how much time could be saved if this question would be avoided?
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