Design Partial Failure States
Feedback & States · errors, status, loading
Updated 2026-07-28
- Stop treating a screen as either working or broken. Most real pages are assembled from several sources, and one of them failing is the common case, not the exception.
- Fail at the level of the thing that failed. If the recommendations panel is down, show an error inside that panel and leave the rest of the page working.
- Never let a secondary failure block a primary task. A checkout that will not submit because a promotional banner could not load is a self-inflicted outage.
- Decide the fallback for each region in advance:
- Hide it, when the region is optional and its absence says nothing.
- Show stale data with a clear timestamp, when old numbers are still useful.
- Show an inline retry, when the user can plausibly fix it by waiting.
- Show an explanation, when the failure changes what the user should do next.
- Be explicit when data is incomplete. A total calculated from three of five sources is wrong, and showing it without a caveat is worse than showing nothing.
- Make one failure produce one message. Five panels failing from the same outage should not stack five identical toasts.
- Recover quietly when the source comes back. The region should fill in without the user having to reload the page or hunt for the retry they dismissed.
Users forgive a piece of a page being unavailable. They do not forgive a whole task being blocked by a piece they did not need.
Related guides
UX Handbook