Deletion: Require two clicks instead of confirmation?

Question

I have an idea regarding deletion buttons...

The usual idea is to either present confirmation modals or allow undoing.

My idea to avoid accidental destructive actions is a little bit different: Require clicking the Delete button two times for the action to be effective.

• If a user accidentally clicks the Delete button once and sees no effect, then well, mission accomplished. If they wanted to instead do X but don't see X done, they are very likely to attempt X again: however, to my intuition, this delay should be enough to take them off "auto mode" and make them pay more attention to where they are clicking.
• If the user purposefuly clicks the Delete button once and sees no effect, then no big deal, they are likely to click it again. I suppose this should work even without any messages; however, to avoid unpleasant surprises of the sort of "WTF The app is unresponsive" it seems reasonable to put an unobstructive message below the Delete button in the lines of "Click again to confirm". Or maybe simply relabel the button from "Delete" to "Delete (1/2)" or anything of the sort.
• Once the user becomes accustomed to the pattern they will know that to delete things they have to click twice. Clicking twice is not a big burden on the user, but it should make certain that every click on the Delete button is intentional: after all, every other click will be a single click.

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Does this hold any water? Is this worth trying? Or is this a silly idea, but I'm not seeing why?

Answer 1

I would say to avoid this because of:

1. Affordance. It's not obvious the user needs to click twice to delete until they try it/do it the first time. Many users are skittish to try things they don't fully understand, especially when it comes to destructive actions like deletion.

2. Overloading. Double clicking already means something in a lot of UIs, so re-purposing it would be confusing.

3. Convention. If most people do something one way, it's important to keep doing it that way just because most people do it that way (to maximize your users' intuition). I understand your question was more theoretical, but it's a very tall mountain you have to climb before you would actually do something nonstandard like this.

Answer 2

I think most UX designers will tell you not to do this. It's not a common pattern, it's not obvious at first, etc. But I'm a big fan of testing things and basing decisions off data rather than heuristics or gut.

I think if you go this route, make the indicator a little more elegant than "1/2". Maybe a small pop up that points at the delete button and says something to the effect of "Delete Item 1? Click again to confirm". As long as they don't have to wait for this to appear and can freely double click, it won't be a burden.

I was recently using a dashboard that makes me type the word "confirm" in a text box to confirm the deletion of an item. I think as long as you are 1) accomplishing your goal (reducing accidental deletions), and 2) it doesn't hurt the user's goal (for example if it made deleting something burdensome, which it doesn't seem like it would), then you can implement it how you see fit. So don't let anyone tell you otherwise unless they have data to back it up.

And to that point, go get data on whether this works as a pattern. And I don't mean have someone test it once or twice. See how your users feel after they have deleted 10, 50, 100 items. At that point they'll know whether this pattern is A) really awesome, or B) super annoying. Good luck!

Answer 3

You are intending two clicks to delete, which should be fine if you change the button label after the first click.

Delete --click-> Really? --click-> Deleted.

Wordpress is using this pattern.

You should always provide an undo, like using a Trash or showing a confirmation of deletion along with an undo action.

Best would be if you test your pattern with some users, 3 to 5 are usually enough to show you if there is a general problem. Provide them with a task like "delete the third item", ask them to think aloud when they interact, and don't help them.

A double-click is the act of pressing a computer mouse button twice quickly without moving the mouse – Wikipedia

This is not accessible to touch screen or keyboard users, and doesn't provide an affordance.