Should destructive buttons be hard to find?

A couple of weeks ago, my friend (and fellow designer) Simon Whatley had his GOV.UK service assessed.

Simon asked me for a second opinion on some of the issues, one of which was about this screen:

Mentor details page with a list of details about the mentor and a red ‘Remove’ link at the bottom.

Perhaps you can spot the issue?

For context, both Simon and I are trained GDS (Government Digital Service) design assessors. And 99% of the time we agree about what the best solution is.

But in this case we disagreed.

He thought the ‘Remove mentor’ link was fine as it was.

But I thought it should be blue and placed just below the h1 heading like this:

Mentor details page with a list of details about the mentor and a b ‘Remove’ link at the top.

Simon put the link at the bottom because he wanted to follow Caroline Jarrett’s rule ‘Make it harder to find destructive actions’.

Makes sense right? It’s a good rule.

But here lies the problem.

Caroline’s rule is actually ‘Make it harder to find destructive buttons’. Here’s the example she uses to illustrate the rule:

A form with three buttons. Two are destructive.

Both ‘Start again’ and ‘Cancel purchase’ are destructive buttons. So clicking one by accident would be bad.

But in Simon’s case, ‘Remove mentor’ isn’t destructive. When you click it, it takes you to another page to confirm the action:

Confirm page asking the user if they’re sure they want to remove the mentor with a big red button to confirm.

In short:

Don’t make it hard for users to find the “remove mentor” link.
But do make it hard for users to accidentally remove a mentor.

Simon had already nailed the latter.

But having the link at the bottom makes it hard to find. If you took the same approach on pages with a lot of information, the link would be off screen.

Also, if you could perform multiple actions on the mentor, you’d want to group them together at the top. Something Simon confirmed happens in other parts of the service.

Mentor details with actions in different places.

Which leaves us with colour.

Making the link red draws attention. But why draw attention to an action that users rarely take?

Plus, making it red may cause some users to think it’ll take immediate effect when it won’t. Why give users pause for concern?

After we talked it out, Simon agreed (yay).

Do I think putting the link at the bottom is a terrible mistake?

No, not at all.

But these details can add up over time.

This is why sharing your work and getting a second pair of eyes on it can be so beneficial.

If you’d like your second pair of eyes to be mine, you might like my course, Form Design Mastery. It’s based on years of usability testing forms including those that are lengthy and complicated:

https://formdesignmastery.com