I see a lot of folks talking about better warnings, etc. Something else to consider for situations like this (or maybe for your apps) is to use the element of

I see a lot of folks talking about better warnings, etc. Something else to consider for situations like this (or maybe for your apps) is to use the element of time to prevent mistakes. For example, when a user wants to permanently delete an account or do any action that’s destructive, irreversible, or catastrophic… queue up a job for 10 minutes, an hour, or maybe a day, that gives the user time to cancel it if they made a mistake. Out-of-band could be another way to prevent mistakes. “Want to delete your account? We’ll send you a link for you to continue via email”. This would also be cancelable. There’s a lot of ways to deal with potentially irreversible actions outside of “better error messages” or checking the equiv of an “are you sure?” Checkbox.