Revocable actions in UX design

Real causes of human error.

Humans make mistakes. We do things we didn’t intend to. It happens — we’re only human, after all. While most mistakes are harmless, and often the words “I’m sorry” will fix everything, sometimes the damage is irreversible.

What are revocable actions?

In the digital world, we can do better than a verbal apology by enabling what’s called “revocable action.” Revocable actions are a set of interactive commands that allow the user to undo any action. With the option of revocable actions available, users can explore, experiment and work more freely without fear of making mistakes, because when accidents happen, they can easily be undone.

Possibly the first computer-based system boasting an “undo” feature for quickly correcting small editing or navigational mistakes was the The File Retrieval and Editing SyStem, or FRESS. It was a hypertext system developed at Brown University starting in 1968 by Andries van Dam and his students.

But in general, revocable actions are a fairly new feature in the IT world, especially for giants like Google and Facebook. Mistakes such as sending a wrong email, message or image used to cost many people dearly and some even ruined their careers or relationships.

Importance of recoverable actions and their implications on our lives

According to a report from identity-protection company Identity Guard, the average American worker makes 118 mistakes per year, many of them involving technology.

The report says that 11% of workers have accidentally copied the wrong person on an email and 20% of workers have lost or deleted important work files.

Today, revocable actions are a standard feature and they are literally everywhere. You can unsend an email, remove messages, restore deleted files, etc. Online digital activity is far less stressful.

Giants like Google and Facebook didn’t have these important capabilities from the very beginning, however; it took them many years to implement the key features. One reason could be technical roadblocks, but the other reason could be that in such big companies, things move and evolve so fast on so many sophisticated initiatives that they simply didn’t get around to thinking about user demand for basic features like ‘undo’ or ‘remove message.’.

Products like Gmail and Facebook became extremely popular in their first 5 years. Back around 2004 when these products and many others were launched, there weren’t so many UX designers and the role was not seen as crucial in product development. User experience (UX) is a term that has been around since the early 1990s, but wasn’t widely recognized as ‘mission critical’ until relatively recently.

Introduction of specific revocable actions

As mentioned, revocable actions are a fairly new feature in the IT world and only in recent years became a standard for good user experience. Some very popular apps failed to introduce them for too long, which had huge impacts on people’s lives.

Gmail was announced on April 1, 2004 and it took Google eleven years to add an ‘Undo Send’ feature to web Gmail, which was introduced on June 22, 2015. And Facebook released the “remove message” feature on February 5, 2019 — eight years after its launch in August 2011.

Stan Chudnovsky, Head of Product for Messaging at Facebook gives one explanation as to why it took so long to implement such a simple feature:

“The reason why it took so long is because on the server side, it’s actually much harder. All the messages are stored on the server, and that goes into the core transportation layer of how our messaging system was built,” Chudnovsky explains. “It was hard to do given how we were architected, but we were always worried about the integrity concerns it would open up.”

Failing to perceive the importance of revocable actions on such popular platforms is equivalent to adding a “self-destruct” button on an appliance. It’s hard to imagine that someone would build a product that can have such negative impacts on business operations or life circumstances if not used precisely right every time.

What is still missing

When users make mistakes and fail to understand the implications of their actions, usually the user is blamed for the consequences. It is the designer’s duty to understand the user, not the other way around. We cannot expect users always to follow our rigid rules and ways of using the product. Problems are caused by bad UX, not the users. We must design with an assumption that there will be mistakes. Very few designers pay attention to scenarios in which things go wrong; they are mostly focused on the times when things work exactly as intended.

Even today widely used apps like Messenger, Viber and many others can get you in trouble because of bad UX. One example is if you send a wrong message and you tap “Remove,” then a dialog box appears with a question: “Who do you want to remove this message for?” with two options: “Remove for everyone” and “Remove for You.” If you accidentally tap “Remove for You,” the message will be removed just for you but the other person(s) will see it and there’s no way to go back and remove it for them. Why would anyone want to delete a message just for himself and not for the receiver(s)? There are probably some use cases that I’m not aware of where it’s useful, but in most cases you just want to remove the message so it’s gone forever, for everyone.

How to implement revocable actions in UX

When building a software product, one of the most important factors is knowing your target user audience and what its needs are, in order to help users achieve their goals in the most intuitive way possible. Product designers very often overlook the importance of UX and make the assumption that users will behave like they do. This is called the ‘false consensus’ effect.

In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias in social inferences, in which people tend to “see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances.”

• Ross, Lee; Greene, David; House, Pamela (May 1977) wrote, “The ‘false consensus effect’: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes.”

UX designers must listen to their users because it is most likely that they have different mindsets, characteristics, goals and circumstances. An effective way to achieve this understanding is to create user personas and to perform different types of testing such as usability testing and A/B testing.

Key takeaways

• Revocable actions make the user feel safe when using your product.
• Designers must design with an assumption that there will be mistakes.
• Real causes of human error can be found in the product design itself.
• Know your audience, its mindset, characteristics, goals and circumstances
• Create user personas and perform usability testing and A/B testing with them.

Real causes of human error are often found in the design of a product itself, so the user should never be blamed for taking a certain action. UX designers should take extra care to make their designs as human error resistant as possible, which is why revocable actions play a starring role in making the user feel safe when using your product.