How to ensure messaging consistency across devices and clients?
Consider this scenario:
A user tries to delete an item from a list. Here's what a normal flow might be:
Confirmation (are you sure about deleting ...?)
Sending deletion request to the server, processing response:
- In case of success, showing a success message, like "... is deleted"
- In case of error, showing a message explaining the problem, optionally including a link to guide the end user
Now, if we're developing a web-based application, things are really easy. But as soon as we start creating clients for other platforms, say Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OS, etc. we encounter a simple problem of keeping this consistency across devices and platforms.
How to ensure that:
Clients show the correct confirmation message? For example Android might show "Are you sure you want to delete 'hiking' from your pleasant activities?", while Windows might show "Are you sure?", and Mac OS might show "You're deleting 'hiking', please confirm."
Clients guide users consistently via server messages. For example on deleting an email from Gmail, what you see in web, is a message showing 'undo' link, while in Android client we see an 'undo' button at the bottom of the screen.
Of course the simplest way is human supervision. One person can be assigned the task of ensuring that messaging consistency exists across applications. However, it's tedius, error-prone, non-repeatable, and non-scalable (linear growth with the size of the application). I'm searching for automated solutions for this.
Update: Another example is when the user wants to change his password. We send him password reset email, and he clicks on the link and he is redirected to the web (maybe he has asked for password recovery email from his iOS device, thus we should redirect him back to iOS, but that's not messaging scenario). Then he enters his new password, and hits 'Save' button. Now either we can log him in, or for any other purpose, we might only change password, and then ask him to log in manually. In the second case, we might show him this message: "Your password is changed, you can now login". In web, we might make the login word a link to the login page. In that case, how can we ensure that the same guidance is incluced in Android app for example, and a message is shown with a button that can be tapped to redirect the user to the login page.