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This is a legitimate point of view, that perhaps developers don't want to hear. Disclaimer: I'm a developer, so I understand the challenge to undo. However, I a
by jayliew 16y ago
This is a legitimate point of view, that perhaps developers don't want to hear. Disclaimer: I'm a developer, so I understand the challenge to undo. However, I also realize that I'm building for normal people (i.e. not myself).
There is no need to be defensive, nobody is attacking anybody. This is just another "best practices" thing.
update: just to add one more note: end-users don't care if the person who built the product like/dislike implementing an undo feature, end-users care if it's easy for them or not.
- lukeschlather 16y agoThe biggest problem with undo is that sometimes allowing the user to recover from a particular action is also undesirable behavior. If I accidentally typed my username and password into a file, I want it to go away, right now. There's a somewhat worrying trend with applications such as Facebook and Google Apps where software is more concerned with making users believe it's doing what they need it to do, and less concerned with doing what users need. I'm not saying this necessarily crosses the line - if I have the space on my server I'm storing lots of incremental backups. But there's always a trade-off. And some people might rather be assured that when they hit delete that it goes away forever than that they never lose anything they meant to keep.
- pan69 16y agoWhat I was trying to get at is that this is often not a "Best Practice" decision. As if the developers didn't think of implementing undo functionality... Implementing such a complex feature such as undo if often a business decision, if anything else.
- jasonlotito 16y agoMaybe it's the belief that it's a complex feature that hinders them? Implementing an undo feature isn't really complex for most things a user does. Outside of anything real time, most things have the capability of having an undo element added to them to some degree. Even then, real time actions can still be undone (credit card transactions, for example).