If you can undo it, don't bother me.

Yesterday I had a discussion with an usability expert about a web interface.
The interface we were discussing was a dashboard control panel. You could delete some things. And every time you wanted to delete one of those thing, the interface would ask you something like "Are you sure?".

The root so so much evil.

We're all been there once: We click the "Delete" button on some program, and just a fraction of a second after we confimed that annyoing "Are you sure?" question, we realized, that we actually wanted to keep it. We blame yourself for being so stupid or get a nervous breakdown because we just deleted the presentation we worked on for the last three weeks.

But we should not blame ourselves. It's not our fault, it's our software's fault. The software does not respect human nature. Humans are built to learn, to adept. Therefore we develop habits. We can't do anything about it. That's how we are.
Every time we do something repeatedly, we learn. In some cases, we learn to that point, until we don't think about it anymore. This is actually a good thing: Because of this behavior we can be more aware to the new stuff happening around us. This becomes a problem when software expects us to mindfully reflect each thing we do. After clicking 1000 times "Yes", (because in most cases, we indeed are sure, that we want to do this shit.), we don't think about it anymore. Hence someday, almost for sure, we will make an error by clicking "Yes", although we actually meant "Hell, NO!"

The average user's reaction after deleting something accidentaly 

What should you do instead?

Offer a undo mechanism. If a user clicks on that delete button, delete that selected item. But make it recoverable. Instead of asking every time whether the user is sure, just do it and offer a possibility to recover from that one time he mistakenly clicked on that button.

I guess the most know example to this might be Google Mail. I heard, Jolla Phones do that. And it's just great. In most cases, offering an undo mechanism will make you app faster to use and hence more fun. And most importantly, it will reduce the errors users make dramatically.

That's how you do it.

So what are the rules?

Your users' data is sacred.

Know that each user interface shapes habits. You cannot avoid that users create habits.Create a user interface, that makes each error recoverable. So for every error you can foresee: Make it recoverable.

Your users' attention is sacred

Don't annoy the user with the same dialogs over and over again. And make the the dialogs as unobstrusive as possible.

Your users' time is sacred

Don't make the user type or click anything more than absolutely necessary. Confirming the action he's doing is not necessary if you can provide an undo. So don't waste you users' time by making him click.