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Jesus, this is the top of the front page? Not only did this user not merge their account (because that doesn't happen, as many people here have noted), deletin
by magicalist 13y ago
Jesus, this is the top of the front page?
Not only did this user not merge their account (because that doesn't happen, as many people here have noted), deleting your account is a pain and a decent amount of work that is difficult to do accidentally (see this walkthrough[1] about how explicit the process is: you have to click a checkbox for each product you currently use), and there is an account restore procedure after deletion[2].
Now, it is possible this user was confused and did all these things, then waited too long to try to restore their account, but there's not much else you can do for a person like this. You don't want a deleted account to be restorable for too long. They ask about Drive documents, but a mainstream and obvious backup for that does exist (not sure what it does if your account is deleted, though). Maybe make multiple sign-in disabled by default so that people won't accidentally do it? That's just going to annoy a different class of users...
Regardless, if people are going to reflexively vote up every bad user story in the google product forums (and why stop there? there are help forums all over the internet!), the front page is going to be...not very interesting.
[1] http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57388685-285/how-to-back-up-then-delete-your-google-account/ http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57388685-285/how-to-back...
[2] https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1212172?hl=en&ref_topic=2382753 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1212172?hl=en&...
- ivix 13y agoHave you considered that the story presents an interesting case relevant to designers of these kinds of UI?
- magicalist 13y agoExcept we can only speculate on the kind of UI involved. - Multi sign-in isn't great, but how did this user get in that flow in the first place? ("Add Account" isn't something most people would find inviting). - How did this user accidentally delete her account? The process is actually fairly involved, and is difficult to do accidentally. - How long did this user wait to restore her account? According to the help docs, you have a grace period to restore an account. - What "representative" did she talk to? As far as I know, there's no chat support for free Google Apps. Without this information, there's only speculation to be had, which is the entirety of this thread (in fact, most of this conversation has to do with "advanced" uses of multi sign-in, and has nothing to do with this story). There are a million stories like this, and this is a poorly told one. As should be expected! The user was not writing this to serve as the basis for a discussion on confusing UIs and bad user flows. That was my point. Feel free to point me to the interesting UI discussion in this thread.
- joelg236 13y agoThere is a lot of UI discussion at the top now.