Error-Tolerant Design (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia’s article on error-tolerant design — an interface that doesn’t unduly penalize a human error, the interaction-design parallel to fault-tolerant engineering.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- Splits error-handling into two layers, ranked by effectiveness: prevention first, mitigation second, for whatever prevention doesn’t catch.
- Prevention is achieved through behavior-shaping constraints — a transmission interlock that blocks reverse gear while a vehicle is still moving is the article’s own example — with poka-yoke named as the general methodology this belongs to.
- Mitigation covers three named techniques: a confirmation prompt (“Are you sure?”) that defaults to the harmless option rather than the destructive one; a trash/recycle-bin pattern that keeps a deleted item recoverable instead of gone; and detect-and-suggest correction (the article’s example: a spell-checker that flags a probable typo and offers a fix using edit-distance/soundex/metaphone matching, rather than just rejecting the word outright).