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Destructive Action Styling

Reserve danger styling for the actions that genuinely destroy something.

moderate User Experience

What it adds

A single consistent treatment for actions that delete, revoke, or irreversibly change data, applied nowhere else.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Audit every button, menu item, and icon control in the app and mark which ones destroy, revoke, or irreversibly change something. Only that set earns the destructive treatment.

  2. 2

    Distinguish the two kinds of removal in wording and in weight. Archiving or deactivating something recoverable is not the same act as permanently deleting it, and they must not share a visual.

  3. 3

    Keep destructive actions out of the primary position. They belong in a secondary placement or a menu until the user has chosen them, at which point the confirmation may present the destructive action as its primary control.

  4. 4

    Do not signal danger with colour alone. Pair the colour with wording that names the object and the consequence, and with an icon or a placement difference, so the meaning survives greyscale, colour blindness, and a forced-colours theme.

  5. 5

    Do not let the destructive palette spread into error messages, validation text, and required-field markers — if everything urgent is red, nothing is. Which actions qualify and what the treatment means belongs here; the rest, hover, active, focus, and disabled variants of those same controls belong to the Hover Active Focus Checklist.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • A soft delete that can be undone from a trash view must not look identical to a permanent purge, or users learn to fear both equally and hesitate over the harmless one.
  • Colour alone fails for anyone with a colour vision deficiency, and it fails entirely in a high contrast theme that overrides the palette with system colours.
  • A destructive action rendered as the loudest control on the screen gets clicked by accident. It should stay quiet until the user has committed to it inside a confirmation.
  • The destructive colour has to meet contrast requirements on hover, while active, while focused, and while disabled, not only at rest — muted danger buttons routinely fall below the threshold once they are dimmed.
  • Bulk destructive actions need the affected count in the label and in the confirmation, because deleting one row and deleting four hundred look identical at the moment of the click.
  • In a dark theme the usual danger red vibrates against a near-black surface. Pick a value tuned for the dark palette rather than reusing the light one.
  • An action that is destructive for other people — revoking a colleague's access, removing a shared record — deserves the same treatment as destroying your own data.

Definition of done

8
  • Only actions that delete, revoke, or irreversibly change data carry the destructive treatment.
  • Recoverable removal and permanent removal are distinguishable both visually and in the wording.
  • Destructive intent is carried by wording and placement as well as colour, and survives in greyscale.
  • No destructive control is the visually dominant action on a screen outside a confirmation.
  • The destructive palette meets contrast requirements at rest, on hover, on focus, and when disabled, in both themes.
  • Error and validation styling is visually distinct from destructive action styling.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.