Never use a warning when you mean undo (2007)

https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning/

by ano-ther • 2 years ago

52 28 2 years ago

Love this idea though not sure it's always practical. Sometimes features get so little use or are replaced so soon that the effort to maintain undo would mean fewer are affordable or ever even get to production.

All that said, for mature features, it does seem like a reasonable thing to require. Unless there are huge fundamentals standing in the way. (Like undoing forget-me requests days later.)

errnesto• 2 years ago

My first thought was “yeah but there are also things you can not undo like sending e-mail” but then I remembered there is a really nice undo send button now (that works by delaying the send a bit).

Sure there are things you can not undo, sometimes you do want to permanently delete something, but maybe with a bit of thinking a undo is feasible more often then one might think :-)

pjerem3• 2 years ago

(that works by delaying the send a bit).

A delay which can be annoying in its own way. It’s rarely an issue to be fair but it means you may not be informed of errors if you leave the mail client too soon. Also there are (admittedly very rare) cases where you want the mail to be sent immediately but it is sent at an unpredictable time : those undo features rarely display a countdown.

pjerem3• 2 years ago

The thing is, this little feature that mostly nobody uses can be a disaster if used once.

At $work we had to implement a feature to delete a custom form object that was linked to maybe hundreds if not thousands of submissions to this form with cascade deletion. The thing is, submissions required something from dozens of minutes to multiple hours. The form was also pretty complex to build and could represent hours of work.

Still, we had to provide full (real) deletion of everything for legal reasons (and it’s hard to implement undo on this).

V1 was a classic "are you sure?"

It was a disaster for our support department and we had to recover data from our production backups way too many times.

V2 we added multiple confirmation boxes with something like "I understand I’m deleting x submissions", "I understand deletion is permanent and can’t be undone", "I understand $WORK support will not be able to help me recover ".

We still got way too much calls of people panicking about what they’ve done.

V3 was the same thing but we added some text to write (à la GitHub).

A little more effective but still not that effective.

The harsh reality is that people / brains just don’t read anything, they just click where they think they have to click.

Also this overkill confirm box would have been enough in a B2C context, but in B2B, you just can’t ignore people because they are stupid because they also pay you big money so they do expect you will solve their fuckups.

IIRC the next step was to implement a hidden undone mechanism like a fake deletion then a cron job does the real thing hours or days matter but it’s a rather expensive and complex thing to implement just to avoid some pretty rare overall (but massive) human errors. But I’m not there anymore.

pc86• 2 years ago

I'm having a hard time seeing the link between "deleting a custom form object" and "delete thousands of submissions via cascade" from a business standpoint. These seem to me like they should always be separate actions, in separate screens. Most of my career has been Enterprise software and we (the engineers) have been asked to implement cascading deletes maybe a half dozen times and we've pushed back on it 100% of the time.

The harsh reality is that people / brains just don’t read anything, they just click where they think they have to click.

Absolutely 100% true. The GitHub "danger section" / "type this long, possibly randomly generated, string of text to confirm you want to nuke everything forever" UI was a major step forward but at least for B2B dev stuff we're started to get used to that. I wonder what the next thing will be.

in B2B, you just can’t ignore people because they are stupid because they also pay you big money so they do expect you will solve their fuckups

You can't ignore them but as long as you have executive backing you absolutely can (and should) say "there were three confirmation screens the data would be lost. The data is lost unless you want to pay Professional Services their hourly rate to go trudge through backups for a day to find it." If you don't have this backing leadership doesn't really care about the tech people and that's a separate issue.

IIRC the next step was to implement a hidden undone mechanism like a fake deletion then a cron job does the real thing hours or days matter but it’s a rather expensive and complex thing to implement just to avoid some pretty rare overall (but massive) human errors. But I’m not there anymore.

This was my first thought, "delete" goes into a queue that gets processed later which gives people time to go "oh shit" and realize they messed up. We had something similar in a large healthcare company I worked at so probably similar legal requirements around storage of things and actually deleting them for real. We would put items into a queue for deletion, and the consumer of that queue was executed on a once-monthly schedule, but would only delete items that had been in that queue for 6 months already. This let any processing around quarter end or that sort of thing figure out something was wrong and gave it additional months to work its way to "find this piece of data and undelete it."

Pain in the ass to manage and would have been completely overkill if we weren't already using queues for basically everything.

asah• 2 years ago

-1: mark-for-deletion is generally best practice, where it doesn't create meaningful overhead in storage or performance. To optimize performance, consider a move-type operation, so expensive operations don't need to scan deleted data, but it's still online for the purposes of fast restore/recovery.

Conceptually, database backup/restore is effectively mark-for-deletion, but with a more difficult path to restoration, especially for one complex object.

If your database or framework/ORM supports it, my favorite solution is to use virtual tables that hide deleted data, so every the code is kept clean and developers don't accidentally query dead data.

I'd love to see an ORM with full undo/redo support. Examples: https://github.com/zchtodd/Flask-UndoRedo https://github.com/etianen/django-reversion

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

IIRC the next step was to implement a hidden undone mechanism like a fake deletion then a cron job does the real thing hours or days matter but it’s a rather expensive and complex thing to implement

I've done this before.[1] How did it work out to be expensive and complex to implement for your use-case? Did the "just deleted" elements have to be removed from any results-set as well?[2]

[1] Gather the data into a structure and throw that structure into a queue/bin/table with `now() + 5 days` as the expiry time.

[2] I've done this too, but not with a soft-delete column (which is a nightmare), but in a more complex way by writing the records to be deleted into a log, and then actually deleting them. This lets the user `undo` by showing them their entries in the log and asking which of those entries need to be restored.

Your task/job/goroutine/thread/script runs once every minute, retrieves all the structures/command/forms with `expiry > now()` and removes them.

blakesterz• 2 years ago

I love that A List Apart is still going strong after all these years! I learned so much from them in the late 90s, early 2000s.

dang• 2 years ago

Never use a warning when you mean undo (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33721930 - Nov 2022 (85 comments)

Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2150361 - Jan 2011 (83 comments)

Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34746 - July 2007 (10 comments)

juliendorra• 2 years ago

Tangential: Aza Raskin is the son of Jef Raskin, who created the single-button mouse interactions for the Macintosh, interactions that differed a lot from the ones on the Xerox machine, and that are the ones we all still use today: click and drag to select several items, double-click to open… great family of interaction designers!

FartyMcFarter• 2 years ago

If an interface is to be humane, it must respect habituation.

This is a really good principle, not easy to implement but good to keep in mind.

mistercow3• 2 years ago

iTerm takes this approach with closing panes, and it’s an absolute life saver. When you close a terminal, it keeps the shell process running until you take some other action, or some timer runs out, and can fully restore it if you cmd-Z.

I really wish browsers would do the same with closing browser tabs.

Edit: To clarify, I mean that I wish browsers would actually keep the tab process running for a short while so that the entire state can be restored. I’m aware of “reopen tab”, but that doesn’t help you in most cases if you have a paragraph typed into a web app and accidentally close it.

flo123456• 2 years ago

At least in Firefox you can restore a closed Tab with CTRL (or Cmd on Mac) + Shift + T.

mistercow3• 2 years ago

Yes, but that just reloads the tab and tries to repopulate input fields. The actual state of the tab is lost.

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

I really wish browsers would do the same with closing browser tabs.

They do, though. Ctrl-Shift-T does it for me (FF).

mistercow3• 2 years ago

That reopens the page, but it doesn’t correctly preserve state. Browsers will typically try to restore things like input values, but all JS state is lost, which means most cases where you had actual work to restore don’t work.

jraph2• 2 years ago

This idea is right.

KDE Plasma embraces this principle with widget deletion, and I believe the KDE UI guidelines pushes this kind of stuff.

I have to say, it's a joy. No additional pointless step / confirmation when I delete stuff and really mean it, which is most of the time, a way back the odd time when I did indeed delete something wrong.

Relatedly, trash bins and file removals without confirmation work very well for the same reason. Let the users empty the trash when they are done, or let a timeout after which deleted item are really deleted from the trash. Less work for everyone, but one more free safety net for the users.

swyx• 2 years ago

i think the ui framework needs to support it more natively. coding up an undo stack can be a real chore

jraph2• 2 years ago

I agree, I have coded undo stacks, it's a bit of a pain (assuming you mean a stack that allows you to undo and redo).

Although strictly speaking, you don't always need one, just a list of stuff the user can restore, in any order. That's because you don't always have dependencies between stuff, and/or you don't always need to be able to redo.

Or even one cell to be able restore the last deletion, that's already a step in the right direction and strictly better than the confirm dialog.

By the way, Plasma might be doing it this way (the list or the cell), you can't arbitrarily undo and redo stuff to my knowledge.

abdulhaq• 2 years ago

kde is built on Qt and Qt has an Undo command stack

d0nd0ne• 2 years ago

I incorporated some undo functionality in my shell.

For the removal of files/dirs, I alias `rm` to `mv -t ~/.trash` in my .bashrc/.zshrc file.

Running `rm foo.txt` then only moves foo.txt into the trash instead of removing it completely.

This can the extended to incorporate a simple automated timed trash empty process.

JohnFen• 2 years ago

I put about an equal amount of effort into ensuring that the recycle bin is completely disabled. I find it really irritating.

It just illustrates how one person's indispensable feature is another person's annoyance. These things should exist, but should always be able to be disabled.

mbwgh• 2 years ago

I like the sentiment, but the article ignores that this approach may incur the price of adding complexity to the implementation. Depending on your architectural constraints, adding an undo operation may not only be hard, it may necessitate changes which in turn make future changes harder as well. Or it may not, of course - as usual it depends.

But even assuming that you are able to follow this advice, I assume (and have personally witnessed) another side-effect. Just as people get accustomed to, and ignore, warnings, they will just as well become accustomed to being able to undo mistakes, and as a consequence become less careful about what they're doing.

One may argue that reserving warnings for only the non-undoable operations will improve their signal-to-noise-ratio and compensate for an overall gain, but whether that is true and worth the additional complexity is not black-and-white.

two_handfuls• 2 years ago

Honestly, as an error-prone person, I need both. That’s because for some reason I sometimes click on things by accident on my phone without noticing.

What good is an undo if I don’t realize I did something bad? The confirmation dialog serves the purpose of letting me know what the phone thinks I asked it to do.

By all means also allow me to undo though. Undo is super important, just that doesn’t mean we should remove all confirmation dialogs.

Terr_• 2 years ago

Closely related to this must be an interface for: "What have I done?"

A simple example of this would be a trash-bin area, which indirectly summarizes recent deletion activity. However that doesn't extend to stuff like "I accidentally moved fifty items to the wrong place, where did they end up and which ones weren they?"

Never use a warning when you mean undo (2007)

Related Stories