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Reminds me of our own quest to stop users from deleting their entire projects by accident in our product. 1st iteration: delete button with a confirmation box
by kgeist 5y ago
Reminds me of our own quest to stop users from deleting their entire projects by accident in our product.
1st iteration: delete button with a confirmation box (standard stuff). Users click through the box in autopilot mode and still delete their entire projects.
2nd iteration: someone came up with an idea: confirmation box + an additional checkbox (if it isn't checked, the delete button is disabled). Users still manage to delete projects by accident. When we asked them how that happened (we've set up so many hurdles!), the user says, just like in the article, that they thought they were deleting a different (test) project.
3rd iteration: I suggested showing the number of objects in the project (just like suggested in the article) so that the user knew they aren't deleting a test project.
I moved on to a different project since, but the saga probably continues.
- langsoul-com 5y agoDamn, would be interesting to know what the effects of the third iteration is. Would validate/invalidate the authors ui suggestions.
- WA 5y agoSame here. I finally brought accidentally deleting stuff down to zero by having them type the number they get to lose: "You have 55,231 GitHub stars. Please type 55231 if you want to delete them all." But I guess, if you delete repos often enough, this will also become muscle memory. Edit: Just saw the other comment here suggesting the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31033996
- spixy 5y agoalmost all of my projects have < 5 stars, typing "0" half the time is more dangerous than typing my_name/my_repo.
- manmal 5y agoSo, for projects with 100+ stars, add a wait period of 60 seconds until the delete button can be clicked _after_ the number is typed in. That should allow most users on autopilot to snap out of it, or make drunk users switch to a different tab and forget about it.
- roflulz 5y agojust do soft deletes that can be undone... seems so easy..
- gscott 5y agoBetter to flag it as archived. This way they can unarchive if need be.
- Agentlien 5y agoI've seen some software, can't remember which, that forces you to type the name of the project you're deleting to confirm. That's made me think twice.
- eknkc 5y agoGitHub also makes you type out the project name and that still did not help here. I guess users will always be able to fuck things up. Best solution would be to offer undos but then people will complain that deleting things does not actually delete. You are keeping data to yourself! Start citing privacy issues etc. There is no winning here.