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I’m not following you there, what has the difficulty of implementing undo to do with whether or not it should always be at least suggested as a clearly superior
by ugh 16y ago
I’m not following you there, what has the difficulty of implementing undo to do with whether or not it should always be at least suggested as a clearly superior solution?
I’m not seeing any assumptions about the difficulty of implementing an undo feature in that sentence (except that it’s not impossible and that some companies have been capable of implementing it). Where do you find those?
I think your prejudices got the better of you.
- damoncali 16y agoI can undo the shit out of Adobe Illustrator, and I still wind up losing work from time to time. How is that clearly superior to accidentally clicking "OK"?
- ugh 16y agoI’m not claiming that undo will protect you from everything. (It doesn’t.) I’m merely claiming that undo is preferable (“clearly superior”) to no undo. Are you saying that Illustrator would be just as good without undo?
- damoncali 16y agoThat's where we disagree. Sometimes an alert is just what you need, and can be better than an undo function (which can get rather complex as your ui gets more sophistiated - hence my illustrator issues). Illustrator is clearly better with undo, but I don't think basecamp, for example, would be.
- ugh 16y agoI’m honestly not following you. I have trouble understanding in what way a warning could ever be better than the ability to undo. Why would it be?
- damoncali 16y agoThere are some things that you change or delete frequently, and that have little value - the points in my illustrator file, for example. I might want to move one a bit, delete it, and then put it back. This is when you want an undo, and are willing to pay its price, both in ui complexity and implementation cost. Other things, you want to delete only occasionally, and may be of high importance, like a character in a video game. this is when you want an alert. If it's not something you do all the time, it's not habit forming ( in the context of this particular game). It adds no complexity to the ui and has nearly no implementation cost, yet it helps protect your important data.
- ugh 16y agoI don’t really understand how undo adds complexity.
- seabee 16y agoIf you go back to the video game example, you have a list of saved games/characters and you can choose to delete a character. Pretty standard stuff. Now you add an undo button and you've gone from two actions to three actions. Furthermore, does the undo apply just to when you delete characters, or can you undo the progress you just made with a character? If it's the former, then your undo is inconsistent. If it's the latter, if you accidentally undo, then you want a 'redo' so you can't lose your new changes either. So now you've doubled the number of options the user can take. And how often are you going to delete a character anyway? Or, you can take the approach games do, which is simply ask you 'are you sure you want to delete this character?' Given this response is distinct from the 'continue game' action, which would display a loading screen, players are likely to notice the prompt. Why complicate things?
- ugh 16y agoI see the challenge but I would still like to be able to press Command-Z at any point.
- 16y ago
- kelnos 16y agoIt wasn't simply suggested as a superior solution. The article states that you should "never" use a popup and instead have an undo mechanism. That's a bit absolutist.