Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Undo. If it's possible, you want undo. If it's difficult, you still want undo. Only when you've satisfied yourself that it's outright impossible should you reluctantly design the UX with the "Are you sure?" prompt instead.

Also, if you must have I_WANT_CANCER type prompts, try to make them involve expressing what it is that the human is agreeing to, because sometimes it's only at that point the human realises their plan was very stupid. GitHub does that here (you have to type the name of the repo, to delete main_project you'll need to type main_project) but many things do not.

This is why I like Git's force-with-lease. When I try to forcibly overwrite the state, because I know Jim's push was wrong and must be undone, force-with-lease makes me express that, "--force-with-lease=jim-daft-change". And when in fact what I'm going to overwrite is Lisa's urgent bug fix, not Jim's erroneous change, the force-with-lease fails and to get it to apply this way I'd need to say "--force-with-lease=lisa-bug-fix" and that's one last opportunity to say "Wait, what? That's not what I want to do".



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: