Adoption
Error Recovery
The ease with which users can recover from mistakes, which determines their willingness to explore and trust.
Error recovery is the measure of how quickly and safely a user can undo a mistake. Products with good error recovery have undo buttons, autosave, version history, and clear error messages. Products with poor error recovery make users fear experimentation, which limits adoption of new features. Error recovery is a trust anchor: when users know they can't break anything, they engage more deeply. When they know one wrong click is catastrophic, they stay on the safe path and never discover the product's full value.