wayfinding-search-and-recovery

What problem does it solve?

This Skill helps recover users when wayfinding fails—such as during broken links, 404/empty states, and navigation dead ends—by letting them quickly find what they need and rebuilding orientation so they can recover on their own.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Search as universal recovery: Design global search that’s reachable from anywhere, searches across the whole information architecture, groups results by category, and shows a result’s source location (breadcrumbs/path) to restore orientation before navigation happens.
• No-results and error recovery flows: Turn search failures into guided next steps (spelling correction, partial-match fallback, recents/pinned/suggestions) and make 404 pages actionable with plain explanations, recovery options, and clear escape routes to known territory.
• Context and destination recovery: Support recovery from “wrong context” via breadcrumbs, “back to …” affordances, and reliable overlay escape (close/Esc), and prevent destination traps with stable URLs and working back behavior.
• Empty states as wayfinding: Use empty states to confirm the user is in the right place and suggest the next meaningful action instead of leaving the user with a dead end.

Quick Start

Use this Skill to redesign your app’s 404 and global search so users can instantly search the entire IA, see where each result comes from, and recover with clear home/dashboard escape paths.