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wayfinding-search-and-recovery

Use this skill when designing search as the universal wayfinding recovery, or when designing for users who got lost — 404 pages, "results not found," "you've reached an unexpected page," empty states that should orient, and any moment where the user's mental map has failed and the system must repair it. Trigger when designing global search, command palette, error pages, or recovery flows. Sub-aspect of `wayfinding`; read that first.

plugins/HDeibler/universal-design-principles/plugins/cognition-and-learnability-principles/skills/wayfinding-search-and-recovery/SKILL.md

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# Wayfinding: search and recovery

Wayfinding fails. Users mistype URLs, follow stale links, click on a section that doesn't have what they thought it would, get teleported by a notification into a context they don't recognize. When wayfinding fails, the system has two jobs: (1) help the user find what they were after, (2) rebuild their orientation so they can navigate again on their own.

## Search as universal recovery

For complex apps, **search is the most reliable wayfinding repair tool the user has**. When the cognitive map breaks, the user types what they want and the system locates it. This works because:

- It collapses the user's failure to find through navigation into a single recall task.
- It surfaces results from across the entire IA, regardless of where the user currently is.
- Modern fuzzy matching handles typos and partial recall.
- It scales to IAs of any size without restructuring.

A robust search experience for wayfinding recovery has these properties: