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I have a messaging app that produces a lot of conversation volume each day. I am adding a favorites section to the messaging feature, and need to define the flow for when a message is deleted. Here is what I have so far:

  1. User A receives message from user B, which starts a conversation >
  2. The conversation exists is in the main messaging view >
  3. User A favorites the conversation with User B >
  4. The conversation gets duplicated into the favorites view (it now exists in both the main messaging view and favorites view) >
  5. User A deletes the conversation from the favorites view >
  6. The conversation is also deleted from the main messaging view.

Here's what needs to be figured out...

When the user deletes the favorited conversation from the main messaging view, is it also deleted from the favorites view?

There are a few sides to this, in my opinion.

  1. If "favoriting" a conversation means duplicating it into a separate inbox, then the message should probably still exist in the favorites view when its deleted from the general messaging inbox. That is, the user was probably doing some housekeeping and deleting conversations from the inbox to clean it up, but wanted to keep their "favorite" conversations separately.

  2. On the other hand, favorites can be viewed as more of a "bookmark," where conversations in the favorites view are quick links to conversations in the messaging view. If favoriting is more of bookmarking, then I think the delete behavior should be synced between the two views meaning when a convo is deleted from the messaging section, it should also be deleted from the favorites section.

  3. There may be some other UX subtleties I'm not considering, which should govern how it should behave, but I'm not sure.

I'm leaning towards number 2 above.

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I agree with you, favoriting a conversation is not duplicating it (at least that's not what I expect). So if you remove if from either the main view or the favorites view, it should delete the message everywhere. The only thing is that you should make it visible to the user that the conversation is "tagged" as a favorite from the main view so he thinks twice before he deletes the conversation.

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  • +1 for bringing up two specific UX concerns. 1: Favoriting a conversation is a tagging feature, not copy feature so the application should just be presenting a filtered list of 'tagged'conversations in the favorites list. 2: An indicator of which conversations are favorites should appear on the list of all conversations and inside of the conversation when it is viewed.
    – Elle_Underscore
    Apr 7, 2014 at 19:07

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