TermCraft conventionFoundational
Graceful Degradation
When something breaks, the rest still works.
Definition
Designing so that when something fails or is unavailable, the experience remains usable at a reduced level.
Craft convention. True because the industry converged on it. Breaking it costs familiarity, not correctness.
In plain language
When something breaks, the rest still works.
Example
A dashboard that shows cached values with an offline marker rather than an empty screen.
Continue from here
Each link says what the connection is, so you can tell a principle from an alternative from a thing people mix this up with.
Deeper reading
The full entry behind this definition.
- Empty StatesPattern
- Loading StatesPattern
- Optimistic UIPattern
Nearby in the Atlas
Adjacent territory, found through shared tags rather than a stated link.