What should happen after soft deleting a record?

Question

Scenario as follows, example is an online survey (policy is to not hard delete anything):

1. You open a survey from the survey list.
2. On the survey, for admins only, there is a special Tools menu in the top right corner. The Tools menu includes admin functions such as Delete, Edit, Complete, etc.
3. When you click Delete, the record is soft deleted.

Should the user then be:

• left on the Survey page, with a Deleted label in the header
• or redirected to the survey list?

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I chose the first option as I thought the Admin may want to go ahead and do more administrative tasks on the record. My QA said she would always want it to go to the list as that's what she would expect.

I am on the fence on this one and don't believe either option is right/better.

Answer 1

I think you should let the admin stay in the Survey Page and choose themselves whether or not to close it and return to the Survey List.

Number 7 of 8 of Shneiderman's "Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design"

Support internal locus of control.

Experienced operators strongly desire the sense that they are in charge of the system and that the system responds to their actions. Design the system to make users the initiators of actions rather than the responders.

Who more of an experienced operator than the admin of your system. When an admin hits the delete button they are initiating a delete action, so the system is responding to their action. But the close action is triggered by the record deletion, therefore the system is responding to its own action, effectively removing the locus of control.

Answer 2

It depends on how often they do that action.

If they need to sit down and delete 20 things, you gotta flip them back to the list. And probably think about setting up multi-delete on the list page.

If they rarely delete these, then just leave them there on the survey. Especially if they would potentially want to do other actions after the delete. Something you just have to ask your administrator users.

Answer 3

From what I understand, the problem is not that it would be difficult to re-open a deleted record, but that the user doesn't necessarily expect it to close after deleting it. Once an administrator (soft) deletes a record, it probably means they are done with it, but since I don't know the specifics, I don't know for sure.

There's an easy solution: make it so the action aligns with what the user expects. One way would be to rename the Delete option "Close and Delete". If pressing Delete brings up a confirmation dialogue window of some sort, another option would be to have three buttons on that dialogue: Cancel, Delete, and Close and Delete (pardon my mis-use of the <kbd> element). This way, the user is always in charge.