For those that don't know, a foot gun is a feature added to a product that makes it easier for the user to shoot themself in the foot. I don't know if that's too American, I don't know what the origin of that is, but basically, the idea being: if a gun is too easy to fire, you put it on your hip and you're trying to show off and it goes off and you shoot your foot. Things should be safer than that. You should try to make it hard for someone to actually do something that terrible.
And finally, avoid soft fails. So, soft fails might be something that you're not familiar with. But basically, a hard fail is something likeāno, you're not allowed to access this. I'm definitively telling you no, that's not allowed.
The opposite of this, according to "Designing Interfaces" by Jenifer Tidwell, is "Safe Defaults."
I was watching a game, recently, and saw a new player build a singularity instead of a regular fusion. It was killed quickly.
Many such cases.
It's one of the reasons I think it's good that
the strider hub has some prerequisites to build, beyond just
avoiding the excessive "drollfests".
There's a reason, in UI design, that choices that entail more risk are left behind an "advanced" button.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17393292https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/footgun"Soft Fail" are also cases where it's easy to make mistakes that don't give quick feedback.
What are your favorite "foot guns" and "soft fails" that you've seen? Mistakes that are easy to make.
My "soft fail" has always been building too much E. And sending in attack forces without micromanaging them.
My foot gun used to be building heavy units and not "guarding" them with raiders or riot units, or just not manually kiting in general.