Confirm Dialog after swipe to delete

Question

I am building an application where I have a vertical list with cards and I want to delete a single item from the list by swiping left. Nothing wrong with this, right?

Well, these items are "important" since other parts of the application depend on them, so I want to put a Confirm Dialog after the swipe action asking the user whether they are really sure about the deletion or not.

Since this is not a common behavior, is it OK to do this?

Answer 1

Nielsen Norman recommends using a confirmation modal before "committing to actions with serious consequences" but not committing to "routine actions." If deleting a list item has serious consequences, which it sounds like it might, a confirmation modal might be the right approach.

If it's likely that users will want to delete several list items at a time, consider adding batch delete functionality where they can select several items to delete. This way they won't have to deal with modal after modal when deleting multiple items.

Answer 2

Just adding to the message above...

Even following the NN/g best practices (sing a confirmation modal before "committing to actions with serious consequences"), when showing the feedback for the user that this item was deleted, it is important to also considered the 9th user interface heurisitics and Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

• Use traditional error-message visuals, like bold, red text.
• Tell users what went wrong in language they will understand — avoid technical jargon.
• Offer users a solution, like a shortcut that can solve the error immediately.(e.g. Undo)