Deletion: Require two clicks instead of confirmation?
I have an idea regarding deletion buttons...
The usual idea is to either present confirmation modals or allow undoing.
My idea to avoid accidental destructive actions is a little bit different: Require clicking the Delete button two times for the action to be effective.
- If a user accidentally clicks the Delete button once and sees no effect, then well, mission accomplished. If they wanted to instead do X but don't see X done, they are very likely to attempt X again: however, to my intuition, this delay should be enough to take them off "auto mode" and make them pay more attention to where they are clicking.
- If the user purposefuly clicks the Delete button once and sees no effect, then no big deal, they are likely to click it again. I suppose this should work even without any messages; however, to avoid unpleasant surprises of the sort of "WTF The app is unresponsive" it seems reasonable to put an unobstructive message below the Delete button in the lines of "Click again to confirm". Or maybe simply relabel the button from "Delete" to "Delete (1/2)" or anything of the sort.
- Once the user becomes accustomed to the pattern they will know that to delete things they have to click twice. Clicking twice is not a big burden on the user, but it should make certain that every click on the Delete button is intentional: after all, every other click will be a single click.
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
Does this hold any water? Is this worth trying? Or is this a silly idea, but I'm not seeing why?