What is the best way to display deleted/removed file to viewer?

Question

Scenario: A viewer make some bookmark of document that he can view. Then manager archive this document.

Output: The viewer now can't view his document that has been bookmarked.

File Permission

Viewer - Can view, bookmark file if given permission

Manager - Can delete, manage any files

Please see attached example of what I mean

How should in-application bookmarks be displayed to the viewer after the things they point to have been deleted by the manager?

Answer 1

Any good solution to your problem will keep the user informed of what is going on. A separate folder that contains archived bookmarks is a good start since it will keep the bookmark list tidy and free of broken links. It is possible, however, that a user might not understand why their link is gone from the list. Therefore I would suggest some sort of informational alert that tells them a bookmark has been moved. Something like this might be advisable:

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

Here the user has been informed that a resource was deleted, which forced a bookmark to be archived. They can still see the bookmark in the archive folder, but cannot select it, reinforcing the idea that it no longer links to the content it is supposed to.

This kind of solution presumes that managers are not going through and deleting dozens of resources each day. Receiving that many notifications in the bookmarks view would quickly become annoying.

Answer 2

Informative and in context

There are endless ways to style this depending on the amount of attention you want to draw. Regardless of the prominence, some explanation of why the bookmark is leaving is in order.

If this is going to be a frequent occurrence, I would display this alert once, possibly for a limited amount of time or with an option to dismiss. The next time they sign in, it would be gone.

If it's likely to be a rare case, the highlighted entry could be persistent until dismissed / deleted.

Answer 3

You can cross it with a red line like this :

You can than move it to the bottom of the list or to a separate trash folder.

There are problems with both solutions:

1. Keeping it in the original list conveys the deletion to the viewer but even though the entry was deleted, it will still be there with the rest of the bookmarks. A solution for this is to ask the user to acknowledge the deletion and only after that remove it from the list, or to automatically remove it once it was displayed at least once.
2. Moving it to another folder will confuse the viewer who knows that he saved the entry and for some reason it is not there anymore. A solution for this is to send a notification to inform the viewer that his bookmark was deleted by another user.